


Lie if God is sleeping

by kaasknot



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, But also canon AU, Cajun culture: an attempt was made, Child Death, Cursed!Babe, Depression, Frequent mood whiplash, Graphic descriptions of wartime trauma, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Modern AU, Near Death Experience, Public Humiliation, Shared Dreams, Suicidal Ideation, The theme of this fic is 'Hurt' by Johnny Cash, This fic wants to be southern gothic but really it's just urban fantasy, Traiteur!Gene, Whump, disturbing dream imagery, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-26 14:36:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 56,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23070289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaasknot/pseuds/kaasknot
Summary: Gene flipped the puzzle over to read the back. “My name is Edward Heffron,” he read aloud. “I killed a man, and now I’m paying the price. 18,000 pieces. It will take approximately seven days to complete me. For experienced players only.”What thefuckwas a curse this nasty doing in a Philadelphia used bookstore?
Relationships: Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe
Comments: 30
Kudos: 80





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [This picture](https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/behind-you-scary-illustrations-brian-coldrick93-5b6ad0a776e3b__700.gif) inspired what you are about to read. I have no excuse, other than suffering from a burning need to write traiteur!Gene. Poor Babe got the short end of the stick.
> 
> Title from Vienna Teng’s “[Pontchartrain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsqh5JhpXwU).”

Gene jerked back, hissing. He held up his fingers to stanch the bleeding, but there wasn’t a mark on them. No blood, no burns, not even a bite--though they were stinging like there ought to be. He swiped his thumb over the unbroken skin, not quite believing; the pain was real, but where was the injury? He looked back at the shelf. Rickety, sagging in the middle; a cheap, particle-wood bookcase, holding only lightweight toys and puzzles.

He glanced around him, but nothing had changed. He was still alone in the threadbare children’s section of an even more threadbare used bookstore, with nothing out of the ordinary beyond layers of dust and teetering stacks of books. Gene didn’t know what passed for hoodoo this far north, but rootwork was rootwork, and there weren't any signs of it here to be seen. No gris-gris in the corners, no rhyme or reason to the position of the shelves, no sigils or amulets or even a fucking basil plant. No religious icons save what was printed on the books themselves. This wasn’t a front for a temple or working group; it was just a bookstore, fending off bankruptcy one poor sale at a time.

That little call plucked at him again, and shivers ran down his spine.

He passed South Philly Used Books every day on his way to and from work, had for almost two and a half years, and not until the sudden downpour had he ever thought to step inside. But as soon as he’d passed over the threshold he’d heard it: a faint little pull, hardly more than a tug against his sleeve, strangled and weak and pleading.

It was a traiteur’s choice, of course. Some illnesses, or some patients, or the spirits they carried, were too inimical to a healer’s wellbeing to safely treat. Gene could have turned and walked right back out the door and been none the worse for wear. But a healer showed through, his grandmother said, and Gene knew from experience that passing up a healing strong enough to ask for help laid a heavy burden on the soul, one that couldn’t be outrun no matter how many buses he rode.

His eyes went back to the puzzles. To one puzzle, the third one down in the stack, with a picture of an old, World War Two-era plane on the side. It was unassuming, just as battered as the others, but Gene _knew_ it was the one that didn’t belong. The cuckoo in the nest.

It was a short, ugly battle of ambivalence. Stay or go, stay or go. The part of his mind not already sorting through supplies was screaming in fear and anger. He’d come to Philadelphia to get _away_ from this bullshit, not to fall even more into it. The Lord worked in mysterious ways, his lily-white ass.

He swallowed heavily and reached out to separate the puzzle from its fellows.

It was polite, this time. There was a prickle of resistance as he set the other puzzles aside, but it let him pick it up without biting him again. A thick layer of dust covered the top. The cardboard felt soft with age, but there weren’t any holes or torn flaps. Gene swept the picture clear, and his heart stopped dead in his chest.

It was of a man. Or rather, it was as if a man had been taken apart piece by piece, his constituent parts horribly stretched, and then layered over each other until they were nothing but a vaguely brownish, nauseating swirl. It was the most malevolent image Gene had ever seen. He looked around the shop again, incredulous and outraged. What the _fuck_ was a curse this nasty doing in a children’s section? 

But there was no one to answer for it.

He glared back down at the gore splatter covering the box, and he felt a warning twinge. Not the same as the faint, pleading cry for help; no, this was the curse itself, promising far worse than bitten fingers if he dared come closer. They stood there, Gene and the curse, and they eyed each other like gunslingers on either end of a dusty western street. Gene half expected a hawk to scream in the background.

“Yeah, fuck you, too,” Gene said, before carefully flipping the puzzle over to read the back. The pieces inside clicked together in a way that sounded nothing like printed cardboard and unnervingly like pieces of bone. “My name is Edward Heffron,” he read softly aloud. “I killed a man, and now I’m paying the price. 18,000 pieces. It will take approximately seven days to complete me; for experienced players only.”

A pang of remorse, soft and worn and certainly not Gene’s, washed over him. He flipped the puzzle back over and he jumped--the picture had changed. Now it showed a black-and-white photograph of a young man about Gene’s age, wearing a WWII military uniform. It was a good face, long and handsome, his hat at a jaunty angle over a smile a little too cheerful to be as cocky as it wanted. A patch with an eagle sat on his left shoulder, and above it was another reading “AIRBORNE.”

Gene let out a shaky breath. “Whose maman did you piss off,” he said, half to himself and half to the puzzle. To Edward Heffron.

The choice rose up in front of him again, but he knew with a grimness that he’d already made it. All the way back when he’d been no higher than a grasshopper’s knee, taken in by the excitement of finally visiting the Old Place--just like that, with capitals and all--outside Belle River, where his mother’s family had moved after Bayou Chene had been drowned by the dammed-up Mississippi. When he’d learned what “traiteur” meant. When he’d become one, half-unwilling. He wasn’t going to leave this poor bastard trapped in his puzzle, no matter how much he wanted to.

“You’re lucky traiteurs don’t charge for their services,” he muttered as he shoved the box under his arm and made his way toward the front. A pitiful gratitude wafted up from it, and Gene gritted his teeth. “Knock that off,” he said, as harshly as he could. “I’m not doing it for you.”

It was hard to tell through the grimy windows, but it looked like the rain was letting up. Gene scowled out at it. If he were on any kind of speaking terms with God, he’d be mighty suspicious of the timing of a thunderstorm that _just happened_ to break right when Gene was walking past a bookstore that _just happened_ to have a curse victim inside. But Gene _wasn’t_ on speaking terms with God, was he.

Though it looked like he’d have to get _back_ on speaking terms, and quickly.

The owner--Gene assumed she was the owner--was waiting by the register when he rounded the shelves. She grinned sunnily at him, showing nicotine-stained teeth. “Find something?”

“You could say that.” Gene laid the puzzle on the counter. The picture had changed again, this time to the old prop plane that decorated the side of the box. Maybe Heffron had been a pilot?

“Ooh, I didn’t know I’d put this one out.” She picked it up and checked for a price tag. “It’s an old one. I’ve had it for, gosh, ten years at least?”

“Is it for sale?”

“Why, certainly. How does $3 sound?”

An embarrassingly low price for a man’s soul. Gene dug into his jeans for his wallet. “I’ll take it.”

***

The puzzle sat on Gene’s kitchen table like an overdue bill. He tried not to look at it; he cooked dinner and paid mind to Renée’s cat all while pretending there wasn’t a curse lurking behind him, waiting for his guard to slip. Now that he was home, in familiar, safe surroundings rather than in a strange bookstore, his acceptance of his fate seemed more like helplessness. Like he was going back to an abusive relationship, or whatever Renée would have called it.

“Waste of three dollars,” Gene said to Piggy, the cat. “I could have bought four days' worth of canned food for you with that.”

Piggy chirruped from the counter, recognizing the word “food.” He stood up and pranced his feet.

“You already had supper. What, you’re gonna eat till you’re swollen up like a tick?”

Piggy meowed again, circling toward his bowl then looking back at Gene hopefully. 

“Dumb cat,” Gene said, but he didn’t really mean it. Piggy slept next to him occasionally, a warm, purring weight against his side, and Gene had to admit, those were good nights.

The curse was still there when he turned around.

Gene had done a little googling when he'd gotten home, but he hadn’t found much. There was an old Philly Times article about a Heffron who’d worked in a local distillery for close to forty years before it closed down, and he’d made a big stink about it to the press, but his name was James, not Edward, and the article was dated to the Eighties. The mystery of Edward Heffron and the man he'd killed would remain a mystery for a little longer.

Gene sighed and leaned his hip against the counter. He made himself look at the puzzle. The picture on the lid had shifted back to the brutal Jackson Pollock. 

It had been long fucking years since Gene had healed so much as a fly, but now, like a bolt out of the blue, that old, familiar urging was back. The urge to _do_, the urge to _help_. His grandmother said that urging was God’s Will making itself known. Gene didn’t especially care. It was as unwelcome as heartburn, and it was caught behind Gene’s throat just the same. _Allez-y_, it whispered, nudging him toward the puzzle. _Dat dere needs you bad bad_.

Gene pushed off the counter and went to the kitchen table. He laid his fingers over the box; it didn’t bite. Lying in wait for a better chance to scare him off, maybe. “The fuck are you doing, Gene Roe,” he asked himself aloud, before picking the puzzle up and carrying it out to the living room. He set it down on the coffee table he and Renée had scrounged from a neighborhood dumpster. 

Seven days to complete it. Was that seven continuous days, or would evenings suffice? Gene supposed the only way to know would be to open the puzzle and see what happened. His job was pretty flexible; so long as he gave some kind of notice, they’d give him what he needed. It helped that he hadn’t asked for Thanksgiving or Christmas off.

It was Monday evening, now. That would put the worst of the healing lag on the weekend; if he was going to do this, he had better strike while the iron was hot. He went to his room and dug out the seven-day candle he’d brought with him all the way from Louisiana. Gene stood by his bed in Philadelphia, the simple white candle in hand, and all at once he was back in his house in Belle River, bag over his shoulder, hesitating in the doorway because he’d caught sight of the fresh, unused candle sitting on the sideboard. He’d gotten it off Nonc Eduard a handful of days earlier, for helping with his Ranger’s busted transmission. Candles were a currency in their own right, in his family. Gene had almost left it, almost thrown up with the burn of guilt in his gut, but he’d taken it anyway. He was glad of it, now. He didn’t know where to get candles like this in Philly.

His rosary was harder to find. It’d been his mother’s, Job’s tears and silver; Gene had stuffed it into the toe of a pair of old church shoes he’d dragged along. He’d almost torn his room apart before he found it. 

“Gene?”

He surfaced from under his bed, rosary in hand, to see his roommate, Renée, standing in the doorway.

“Hey,” he said, breathless with an odd sort of triumph.

“Hey,” she replied. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just…” he held up the rosary. “Couldn’t find it.”

Renée’s brows rose. “I didn’t know you were religious.” She didn’t quite ask it, her tone deliberately casual.

Gene hesitated. “It’s complicated,” he finally said, pushing himself to his feet.

“Most things about religion are.” She bit her bottom lip, and Gene could hear the weight of the question she wanted to ask sitting on the tip of her tongue.

He braced himself. He’d grown closer to Renée than any other person short of family, but that didn’t say a whole lot. She knew was that he was from Louisiana, that he had a large family, and that he’d fled home three years ago. As far as personal history went, she didn’t know much more, and Gene hadn’t offered.

“Family stuff?” she asked in a light, breezy tone, the one they both used to allow each other an out when the uncomfortable stuff came too close to the surface.

“Sort of,” Gene said slowly. “Not them directly, but… the family business, I guess you could say.”

“Oh,” Renée said. “Okay.” He could see her curiosity churning, but Gene didn’t know how to explain further, so he sat there awkwardly, looking down at the rosary wrapped about his fingers. The unofficial policy of the Roe-LeMaire household was to only accept information offered, and never to ask. Gene didn’t say anything, so Renée shifted her weight away from his door. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ve got study group tonight, I’ll be back late. Thanks for feeding Piggy.”

“Yeah, sure.” He waited in his room for her to collect her books and head back out the door, cooing at Piggy before she closed it behind her. Gene wasn’t one to keep secrets, but this was too big to explain. He stared at the rosary in his hand. He’d have to polish it soon; tarnish was collecting in the joints. 

The puzzle was still on the coffee table where he’d left it. Gene sat on the couch and stared at it. Just stared at it, rolling the rosary beads around his fingers. He’d used to pray the rosary twice a day, he’d been so afire with devotion. Time had calmed him down, but the last three years had done more. He pursed his lips. The last thing he wanted to do was to pray. He wrapped the rosary around his wrist. “Our Father,” he began, keeping his voice low in case someone heard. “Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name…”

He sank into the healing trance, slow and familiar, like he’d never stopped. He lit the candle. By the time he reached “Forgive us our trespasses,” he was ready to open the box. He hesitated, like he had in the doorway in Belle River, his fingertips pulling at the cardboard edges; he felt the torn apprehension and hope of the occupant within. When he said the final “Amen,” he lifted the lid.

A sensation like a spider’s web settled over his shoulders, and Gene tensed. He’d never broken a curse before, but his grandmother had taught him the ins and outs, in case he ever had to. The first and most important thing, she had told him, was that all curses held a geas: a line of fine print in the contract, the curse’s last effort to protect itself, and there was no way of knowing what it was until you went ahead and broke it. He kept himself from swearing. He was in a hallowed space, now; bad blood or not, reverence was due Him whom Gene invoked for aid. 

He almost broke that vow half a second later, when he saw the contents of the box. “Eighteen thousand pieces,” he said, his stomach sinking to his feet. 

They were each about half the size of a dime. The pattern on them was muddled and indistinct, their edges soft and frayed. Gene poured them out of the box onto the coffee table; the pile they made stood three inches high. _Seven days_. Fine print, indeed. He took a deep breath, then began digging for edge pieces. “Miserere mei, Deus, secundum misericordiam tuam…”

He lost time. The candle flame flickered; his rosary beads clacked against the battered wood of the coffee table top. God’s grace was a warmth in his chest, radiating down his arms and into his fingers, bringing the pieces he needed to hand, fusing them together without a seam. Prayers fell from his lips: in French, in Latin, in English, in whichever language he’d learned them first. Some were sung, some chanted, some spoken; most weren’t voiced at all, save in the silence of his mind. Gene didn’t notice. There was only the endless, cascading shift of pieces running through his fingers.

He placed the final border piece with a quiet sense of satisfaction. Unbidden, the words bubbled up: _God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day_. He didn’t say them aloud. Gene’s faith was shaky, but blasphemy was a poor look when channelling the Holy Spirit.

A clicking sound drew his attention. He looked up, to the corner of the living room furthest from the window. A skeleton stood there, glowing faintly from no light source Gene could see, each of its joints tidily wrapped up in a band of ligaments. The healing trance was still upon him; he felt no fear at the sight, only communion, and the knowledge that he was seeing a miracle. Then the skeleton turned its head and looked at Gene, and though the sockets of the skull were empty, they were so full of Presence that Gene’s heart almost leapt through his ribcage.

He lost his grip on the healing trance.

The candle flame flickered out. The warmth that had sustained him flooded away, and he sagged back against the couch like a puppet with its strings cut. The skeleton vanished, leaving only the empty living room and Gene gasping for breath. Terror rushed in to fill the void God’s grace had left behind. Exhaustion took the place of peace. Gene leaned against Renée’s acre of throw pillows and trembled like he was back in high school track, running wind sprints down the levy. Every rational thought in his mind fled; he wanted only to run away, to hide under the blankets, to get off the couch and investigate where the skeleton had stood, to raise the hand holding the rosary and say a prayer--but breathing alone took more effort than he had in him, so he stayed frozen on the couch, waiting for the curse to send its guardian to tear him apart for the insult of opening the puzzle.

_Don’t you go touchin’ gris-gris you don’t know,_ he heard his grandmother saying in his mind’s ear. _You don’t know who’s holdin’ the strings_.

But nothing happened. The skeleton didn’t reappear. Eventually, Gene’s heart slowed, and he raised a trembling hand to push himself up from the couch. It was only then that he saw his handiwork. The entirety of the puzzle border was finished, fused into a single piece. It took up most of the coffee table, and it was not a small table. Gene tried to recall the calm, peaceful satisfaction in placing the last piece, but it was gone, leaving only fear he was too tired to act on. The very last thing he wanted to do was stay in this apartment one more minute, but he didn’t have a choice. He staggered down the hall toward his bedroom, leaning heavily on the walls as he went, and collapsed in bed. He didn’t bother pulling up the blankets; he was asleep between one breath and the next.

***

There was something wrong with the air. Gene breathed in deep, trying to recognize the scent, but it escaped him. Smoky, but not like burning wood--it was dirtier, like cigarettes almost, but not quite that, either. He opened his eyes--maybe he’d left the oven on?--and froze.

He wasn’t in his bedroom. He wasn’t even in his apartment. He stood in a city street at night, and he knew it was in Philadelphia, even though he’d never seen this street before in his life. The car he stood next to was old, the old, solid steel kind you never saw in a place as vulnerable to hurricanes as Southern Louisiana. It was in mint condition. He was surprised its owner had parked it out on the street, like this; it was probably worth more than all of Renée’s student debt. Then he noticed that the car parked behind it was just as old, and the cars on the other side of the street were, too.

And there was that smell. Some of it was exhaust--the heavy, high-emissions stink of engines with a busted catalytic converter, or of old engines that didn’t have them at all. Some of it was city-stink: stale urine, rotting garbage, and the dank, muddy smell of water. Wherever he was, it must be close to the river. But under everything was that wood-ash-and-cigarette smell that Gene _didn’t_ recognize. He scanned the rooftops for an orange glow, listened for sirens, but there was nothing. No signs of a fire that he could see.

That’s when he noticed the advertisement on the side of the building. It was retro-style, for washing flakes. Gene had seen a few old-fashioned ads like that before, painted directly onto brick rather than on a billboard, mostly for the nostalgia factor. This didn’t look like nostalgia, though. He looked around, and the more he looked, the more out of place things became: the fonts on the signs were old-fashioned. The storefronts were painted wood, not polished aluminum. Even the _parking meters_ were strange, cast iron with dials instead of plastic and digital.

He had to be dreaming. Gene had no memory of coming here, and unless he’d gotten lost and found himself on a film set, he didn’t see how this unrelenting periodicity could exist outside of a dream. The curse, maybe? He looked around for people, but there weren’t many; more down the street, at the intersection of what looked like a larger road, but all the businesses closer by were closed up for the night, and the only signs of life were the lights in the apartments above.

He turned at the sound of footsteps. A man slumped toward him, his steps weaving unevenly. Gene couldn’t see his face, not with how the shadows fell, but he could see the ember of his cigarette flaring dull against the dark. Gene stepped out of the way to give him room. 

“You forget to pick up your laundry, or something?” the man muttered as he passed, in the thickest Philly accent Gene had ever heard.

“What?” Gene looked down at himself. Jeans, his dad’s old workboots, a henley. Nothing too egregious, but if this was the 1940’s like he suspected it was, then perhaps he _would_ look underdressed to the locals. Not that this guy had any room to judge; he was down to his shirtsleeves and suspenders.

“Fuckin’ Christ,” the man said, shaking his head, not even slowing his pace, but then he stopped dead in his tracks. He turned around to look at Gene, and now, properly lit in the yellow glow of the streetlight, Gene recognized him. He was a far cry from the clean-cut service photo on the puzzle box, but this could only be Edward Heffron. “Jesus Christ,” Heffron said, in an altogether different tone. “You’re real, aren’t you!”

“I… uh, last I checked?”

Heffron ran a hand through his hair. It had looked dark blond in his service photo, but now Gene saw that it was Irish red. “Fuck.” The cigarette bounced forgotten on his lips. “Why the _fuck_ did you have to open the puzzle, huh?”

Gene didn’t have the first idea how to answer that. “No other way to break the curse,” he finally ventured.

“Oh--oh, so you _knew_ it was a curse, but you opened it anyway! Jesus _Christ_ what are you, some kind of--” Heffron cut himself off, turning away to take the cigarette out of his mouth. “Fuck. _Fuck_.” He flicked off the ash and brought it back up to his mouth for another pull. He was, Gene realized with a slow, unwanted wash of heat, even more handsome in person. Not with the schoolboy mischievousness of his service photo; no, this was tired, unshaven cynicism, and in the yellow sodium wash of the streetlamp, Heffron looked like a fallen angel, his hair in disarray over his despairing brow. Gene was caught despite himself.

“I’m Gene,” he said.

Heffron snorted cigarette smoke. “Heya, Gene, I’m Babe.”

“_Babe_.”

“Yeah, that’s my name. You got a problem with it?”

Gene shook his head. “No.”

The conversation lulled. Heffron--Babe, God what a nickname--slumped against the light post. He smoked the cigarette down to his fingers and tossed the stub into the nearest alleyway. “Not much of a talker, are you, Gene.”

Gene shrugged.

“This is gonna be a great couple’a days. Just great, I can tell.”

Professional curiosity tugged at Gene. “Have other people tried opening it?”

“Yeah, a few.” Babe made a complicated face, glancing up to Gene before looking away again. “Look, Gene, don’t take this the wrong way, I’m sure you’re a swell guy and all that, but. You should have put the puzzle down and ran in the opposite direction.” He covered his face with a shaking hand. “Fuck. It’ll kill you if you don’t finish it, did you know that?”

A frisson ran down Gene’s spine. He let out a slow breath, suddenly aware of the beating of his heart. “I didn’t. But I figured it had a surprise waiting. Curses usually do.”

Babe looked up at him, properly looked at him, since the moment he clocked Gene as “real,” whatever that meant. “You sound like you’ve seen this kinda shit before.”

Gene tucked his hands in his pockets. “Not personally. But I’ve heard stories.”

“What, on your grandma’s knee, or something?”

“Yeah, actually. She, uh, she’s a traiteur.”

Babe stared at him blankly. “The fuck is that?”

“Well, it’s--” Gene shifted his weight. “It’s a lot to get into. But she’s broken curses before.”

An awful hope dawned on Babe’s expression, raw and torn open, and Gene had to look away to give him privacy. “Are you one’a them, too?” Babe asked.

“I guess so, yeah.” Gene ran a hand over his mouth. He hadn’t been anything for three years, and now all of a sudden he was a traiteur again?

“Okay. Okay, just.” Babe gave a shaky exhale. “What year is it? Out there.”

“2019. Almost 2020.”

“Jesus.” Gene looked up, and the expression on Babe’s face was just shy of wild. “Last person who tried to help me was in 2001. _2020_. Joe’d give his left nut to see this.” His smile was crooked, and not very cheerful. “You got jetpacks in the future?”

“Sorry to say, we do not.”

“Well, fuck.” Babe folded his arms across his chest, and another long pause fell between them. “So what language is that, traiteur, sounds French.”

“Well, it is.”

“You speak French?”

“All my life.”

“You sound American.”

Gene rolled his eyes. “I _am_ American. Half-Cajun, from Louisiana.”

“No shit?” Babe brightened at that. “Go fuckin’ figure. We could’a used someone like you, ‘specially--” His expression closed off, looking into dark memories.

“You were in Europe?” Gene asked quietly. In the distance, a horn honked.

Babe’s shoulders hunched. “Don’t wanna talk about that, if it’s the same to you. Tell me about Louisiana.”

Gene didn’t especially want to talk about Louisiana, either; he’d run to Pennsylvania for a reason. But he figured the trauma of fighting a world war was worse than what he was carrying. “Don’t know where to start.”

“Ah, come on. What d’you miss? You miss your ma, right?”

Gene sucked in a sharp breath. “She died.”

“Shit, Gene, I’m sorry.”

“S’fine,” Gene said, even though it wasn’t. Four years, and it still felt like a kick in the chest. He pushed past the ache. “I, uh, I miss her cooking.” All at once, a dam broke he hadn’t even known was there. “I haven’t had a decent gumbo since I left Biloxi. You Northerners seem to think sour cream is spicy, there’s _one_ grocery store I could find that sells any peppers other than jalapeños, and good fucking luck if you need a Scotch bonnet. The only place I can get decent heat is at the Thai curry shop on the corner, but my roommate’s parents were from Belgium and she’s even worse than the rest of you, so if I want any I’m on my own.” He rocked back on his heels, a little embarrassed at spilling all that.

“You don’t say,” Babe said with a wry smile. He sobered quickly. “Belgium, huh. We fought in Belgium. Ugliest stretch of--” He cleared his throat. “I’ve never had, whatsit, ‘Thai curry.’ Is it any good?”

Gene watched Babe’s face carefully. He was putting on a brave front, but there was a lot of shit beneath the surface that he wasn’t dealing with properly. Did they even have psychiatrists in the Forties? “Yeah, it’s good. If you get it right.”

“Sounds foreign.”

“From Thailand. Siam?”

Babe whistled. “You found Siamese food in Louisiana?”

“I live in Philly, now. And yeah.”

“In _Philly_, how the fuck did you get here? That’s halfway across the damn country!”

Gene looked away. “Took a bus.”

“Alright, hey.” Babe raised his hands in appeasement. “I can take a hint.”

His attention was palpable, a weight on Gene’s skin, and Gene didn’t know what to fucking do about it. “How many people have opened the puzzle?” he asked, for anything to say to get Babe to stop looking at him like that.

Babe spat in the gutter. “Enough. Buncha idiots who thought I was worth their lives.” He looked absolutely wrecked, and Gene, Christ, Gene knew he had his problems, but he didn’t have shit next to Edward Heffron.

“So I’m an idiot, huh?” he asked, returning fire like he might’ve to his brother.

Babe’s head jerked up in surprise. He almost managed a smile. “Ain’t gonna lie, Gene. If you knew what that puzzle was and you still opened it, then yeah, you’re a goddamn fucking idiot.”

Gene just looked back at him. He didn’t have anything to say to that, so he just looked, and the eye contact stretched longer than it should have, but Babe didn’t look away, and Gene didn’t either. Heat rose up between them, heavy and slow. Gene didn’t know a whole lot, but he knew what _that_ meant. He wouldn’t have thought that a World War Two veteran--but queer folk had always existed, even in the Forties. Statistically, even veterans. Babe’s lips parted, his expression going wary, and Gene took a breath to reassure him--

High heels clacking on the sidewalk interrupted him. He turned to see a couple, a man and a woman, walking down the street towards them. All the heat melted out of Babe’s expression, replaced by something close to dread. “So, uh, Gene. These dreams, you’re gonna see some fucked up shit. I think the curse digs through our memories, or something. Uses them against us.”

“Alright,” Gene said, apprehension curdling low in his stomach. “Just so long as you don’t see the time my brother stuffed a frog down my shirt.”

Babe blinked at him in surprise. “Why, what happened? Did you scream like a little girl or something?”

Gene gave a tight smile. “I waited a couple days till I found a plainbelly water snake. Dropped that in his bed while he was sleeping, he woke the house screaming that a cottonmouth bit him.”

Babe gave a long, slow whistle, his eyes wide--right as the couple walked past them. His shoulders dropped. “Fuck,” he breathed.

The man turned. “Did you have something to say to me or my date?”

“Yeah,” Babe shot back, quick as a whip. “She’s got a great pair of legs. Think they’d look even better around a real man.”

Gene goggled at Babe, who gave him the most miserable, embarrassed expression Gene could have imagined.

The man bristled. “I’m sorry, _what_ did you just say?”

“You heard me,” Babe replied, and Gene heard the belligerence of a man fresh from war, with the noise of bullets in his head and a rage he couldn’t sate burning in his chest. 

The woman tugged at his arm. “George, let’s just go.”

He ignored her and sneered at Babe, looking him up and down, and his disdain was so severe that even Gene, standing outside the blast radius, colored at the embarrassment of it. “So much for the neighborhood.”

Babe pulled away sharply, squaring off in the middle of the sidewalk. “You wanna fuckin’ say that again?”

The man glanced at Gene, and Gene had the feeling that if he hadn’t been there, then this man, George, would have backed down without the fight Babe was gunning for. But there was a witness, and his pride was on the line. “I said, the neighborhood doesn't need your kind degeneracy ruining it for honest, right-minded people.”

Babe’s shoulders tightened, and Gene remembered abruptly that whoever else Babe Heffron was, he was also a trained soldier. “Babe.” He reached out to him to try and cut the fight off, but Babe shrugged him off. 

“It's a free fuckin’ country,” Babe snarled, his handsome face twisting unpleasantly, and Gene, he didn't want to see this. He didn't want to see whatever ugly baggage of Babe’s the curse was going to drag up. 

“Freedom I fought for!” George returned. “So maybe show a little respect!”

“I’m a paratrooper, asshole, 101st Airborne!”

A jolt of surprise ran down Gene’s spine, but he didn't have long to process it--George drew himself up and said words that rippled through the fabric of the dream:

“Then you're a disgrace to the uniform.”

Babe lunged. It happened faster than Gene could see, even though he was expecting it. It happened faster than Gene would have thought a man could move.

“Babe!” he shouted at the same time he heard the woman cry, “George, no!”

They exchanged blows. Babe got George into a grapple before George broke it. Gene willed with all his strength to jump in, but his feet were rooted to the spot. Someone yelled, and a bright bloom of blood spilled down Babe’s chin. Gene willed himself to step forward with all his might, pressing against the curse until the dream wavered and he threatened to wake up. He took the hint. He eased back, his teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached, and let the drama unfold.

It was over quickly. Gene wasn't sure what did it, if it was Babe’s wildly-thrown punch, or the crack in the pavement George slipped over, or something else entirely. But Babe landed a solid hit, and George staggered back, his heel catching on the sidewalk, and then he was falling, almost as if in slow motion, as though the curse couldn't forget this particular moment, as though it was graven into the memory of whoever had cast it.

George fell backwards, his head collided with the edge of a parked car with the hollow sound of a melon dropped from a height, and he didn't get up.

Babe rocked back, his hands still in a boxer’s stance, his eyes glassy and his nose and chin smeared with blood, but the expected attack didn't come.

“C’mon!” he barked, his consonants loose and slurred. “Get up n’fight me!”

The woman had knelt by George’s shoulder, awkward in her heels and careless of her stockings. “George?” she said in a small voice. She shook his shoulder. “_George_?”

If Gene had had the control of his body, he would have been beside her, checking George’s pulse, pupillary reaction, and sending for help. Instead, he stood rooted to the ground. Not that he thought it would make a difference; George’s eyes were blank and staring. 

“Babe,” Gene’s mouth said without him, “I think you killed him.” 

Babe shot him a look that was absolutely white-faced with horror. Gene couldn’t say any of the things he wanted to, couldn’t so much as reach out and touch him, and in the face of his lack of support, Babe backed away. “I’m sorry,” he said weakly to Gene. “I’m--I didn’t mean to--” He stumbled off the curb, falling to his ass in the gutter. That seemed to jar him from his fugue, and he lurched to his feet, toward the woman cradling her fallen beau. “Let me--”

“Get away from him!” she snarled.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said, his expression riven. “It was an accident.”

“I don’t _care_!” She was sobbing in earnest now, George’s head on her lap. Gene stood unmoving, watching all.

“I’m sorry,” Babe said again, his voice breaking.

The woman ignored him, and he stood up slowly, and Gene saw a fine tremor through his body. He took a step back, then another, until he finally turned around, walking away faster and faster until he was running down the street. 

Gene didn’t follow. He stood, pinned by the curse, and witnessed the woman’s grief. It was ugly. Her voice was raw, her sobs shaking her entire body, and no one came to help. Eventually she cried herself out, and then she looked up and saw Gene for the first time.

Gene was trapped by the fierceness in her gaze. It was preternatural; it was more than memory, it was the curse itself. She stood, and the scene around her dissolved. Her dress changed; her stomach swelled with pregnancy, and then Gene was standing before her in a nursery filled with hand-me-down furniture and water stains on the ceiling. There was something vile squalling in the crib. Something that wasn’t a baby, but nurtured and tended like one. Gene’s eyes skittered off it and back to the woman. Her eyes bored holes into his soul. “He killed my fiancé,” she said in a flat, resonating voice. “He broke me into pieces, so I broke him into pieces.”

“What’s your name?” Gene asked, and he was relieved to find that he could.

“Marjorie Crake. Did you open the puzzle?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then he’ll kill you, too. He’s a murderer, and a murderer he’ll stay.”

“What are the terms of the curse?”

Her face twisted. “I tried my hardest. I poured all my anger and hatred into it. He stole my _life_ from me! I had a future, and he destroyed it!” Tears ran down her face, and her eyes burned. “But seven days’ grace slipped in. Finish it before those seven days, and you’ll live.”

The edges of the dream were starting to fade. Gene was aware of his body breathing, the filmy edges of consciousness returning to him. Renée’s cat was nuzzling his hand, his whiskers rasping their way into the dream. “How many people have tried before me?”

“Four,” the shade of Marjorie Crake answered. “He killed them, too.”

“No,” Gene snapped, his anger taking him by surprise. “_You_ killed them.”

Her scream raised the hairs on the back of his neck, and Piggy spooked off the bed. She lunged forward to grab him--her nails dug into his arm, but he woke up a moment later, lunging upright as though to fling himself as far away from her as possible. He gasped, his heart racing. He raised his arm, and four parallel scratches ran down the tender skin just above the inside of his wrist. 

“Fuck,” he said, willing his heart to slow.

It was early morning, maybe 6:30 to judge by the light coming in through the window. He could hear Renée clattering around in the kitchen. They were both morning people, though Renée usually spent an hour or so reading in bed; it was unusual for her to beat him to the punch. He winced at his brain’s choice of words, and then winced again, because the scratches twinged.

“Don’t antagonize curses,” he muttered to no one in particular as he dragged himself out of bed and staggered across the hall to the bathroom. Before anything, before even taking a piss, he had to brush his teeth. His mouth tasted like week-old skunk roadkill. 

He stared at his face in the bathroom mirror as he brushed, but it was Babe’s face he saw. The sheer, disbelieving horror on it, when he realized he’d killed a man. How many men had he killed in Europe? Freshly back from the war, all he probably wanted to do was live a quiet life, and he ended up killing someone by accident. At fault for not letting it drop, yes, but there was no way Babe could have predicted the outcome of that fight. Gene leaned forward and spat.

“You’re finally awake!” Renée chirped when he shuffled into the kitchen.

“I guess.” He went straight for the cupboard with their mismatched, thrift store glasses.

“‘I guess,’” she mimicked. “You slept like the dead.” She looked up from her bubbling pot of oatmeal, and went cautious. “Rough night?”

Gene looked down at himself. He was still wearing his wrinkled clothes from the day before, minus his shoes. “Could have been better,” he said slowly.

The balance between them was shifting in unusual ways. Gene had stepped out of the comfortable habits they’d both established, and both of them felt the sideways tilt of change.

“It’s something to do with that creepy puzzle, isn't it?” Renée asked, carefully stirring her oatmeal.

Gene glanced through to the living room. The puzzle was there, hogging the table, and even in the early morning shadows he could sense something was off about it. Piggy, who got into everything and made messes like they were sport, hadn’t touched it at all. “Yeah,” was all he could think to say.

“Well, as long as it’s not devil worship or something,” Renée said lightly, trying to break the somber mood. “We’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”

“It’s not devil worship,” Gene replied with absolute sincerity.

She looked at him uncertainly, and Gene knew he was fucking things up, but he didn’t know how to stop it. For two years he hadn’t had to say anything, and now, when it came time for him to speak, neither of them knew how to handle it.

Christ, he was so tired. He opened the cabinet and took out his favorite polka-dot glass. “I’ll tell you if it’s anything bad. There _is_ something going on, and it’s serious, but it’s not… a problem.” _Yet_.

Renée gave him a level, assessing look. He tensed against the questions he knew were coming--but she just sighed and went back to stirring her oatmeal. “You're weird,” was all she said. She fell back on the tenuous trust they’d built up between each other, and Gene almost shook with relief.

Gene gave a small sigh of relief. “And yet, you've lived with me for two years.”

They finished their morning routines in a companionable silence, and Gene did his best to shuck off the trailing emotions of the dream.


	2. Chapter 2

The exhaustion of the morning didn’t go away. That wasn’t too unusual; sometimes it took a day or two to recover from a healing. Gene sat slumped in his seat on the bus and tried not to think about the implications of seven, back-to-back days of healing. Babe was right: he _was_ a fucking idiot. Any traiteur with sense would have waited to open the puzzle until he had backup. The first thing Gene should have done, before anything else, before he’d even found his rosary, was call his grandmother.

Yeah. And he should have taken up flying as a hobby, too. 

He’d just gotten off the bus and started down Two Street when his phone rang. He pulled it out, his thumb already poised over the “decline” button, but instead of the usual out-of-state 800 number of a solicitor, an all-too familiar name flashed across the screen. _Talk of the wolf_. Gene stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, other commuters parting and flowing about him, their protests falling on deaf ears. The call went to voicemail before he could make up his mind whether or not to answer.

His grandmother had called him incessantly after he'd left, at least once a day for about a month straight, before she’d eventually wound down. Now she mostly texted him updates on the family and neighbors, and Gene had made himself text back updates that he was alive and breathing. But he didn't let her in any closer than that. He didn't answer phone calls, didn't deviate from the three word message “I’m still alive” once a month. It was an unnatural state of being for a Roe, and even less so for a Verret. Gene felt some days he'd vanish away to nothing, that in the absence of his family he was worth less and less each day--after all, a traiteur without community was just a man.

But Gene couldn't go back. He’d made his bed, and he'd laid in it, and these were the consequences. Mémé Eva would have brought him back into the fold anyway, he had no doubt of that, but the knowledge would still be there in the family, in their gossip and dark looks, that he was the Roe boy who had--who’d--

The phone lit up in his hand again, as though his grandmother had sensed his spiraling thoughts. Was it pride or fear that kept him from answering? Neither were worthy of a healer. He had just thought, not even fifteen minutes prior, that he should have called her. Coincidence or God, he would be an even bigger idiot to let this moment pass by. 

He answered the call, apprehension churning low in his stomach. “Oui, Mémé.”

An explosion of French came at him. “Don't you go being that short with me, tataille! I helped your maman bring you into this world, I can take you back out if you sass me!”

Gene held the phone away from his ear, his cheeks burning. “Sorry, Mémé,” he mumbled back in English, pulling off to the side to stand under a pawn shop awning.

“I can’t hear you when you speak that Devil’s tongue at me, Eugène Roe, did you forget your roots out among the Anglais?”

“Oh my _God_, Mémé, it was _four hundred years ago_\--”

“And that's how long it's been since you spoke to me last! I could have had a heart attack, and then how would you have felt? And don't you take le nom de notre Seigneur in vain, you know better!”

“Je suis désolé!”

“You had better be! Now.” He could imagine her settling herself on the stool by the phone, like she always did for a long chat. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

Gene sucked in a ragged breath. Rush hour foot traffic passed him by, and his grandmother’s voice cracked through the façade of apathy he'd put up between himself and the reality of his future.

“Did you dream?” he asked.

“Oh, did I,” she replied darkly. “And you’re gonna explain it to me, Eugène.” 

His reticence bled out of him. “It's bad bad, Mémé,” his voice barely above a whisper, but he couldn't muster the strength to speak louder. “If it goes right I’ll save a life, but if it goes wrong I could--I--” His throat closed up.

Evangeline Verret took this news with the unflappability of a seasoned traiteur. “Is it a gris-gris?”

Gene shook his head even though she couldn't see it. “I thought so at first,” he replied. “But it’s conjure. Grief and hate so strong it came into being.”

“Oh, cher.”

The whole story came spilling out. His mémère listened, letting him lance the wound. “He’s a good man, Mémé,” Gene said, stumbling to a close. “I know he is. He doesn't deserve to stay in that puzzle any longer than I have breath to help him.”

“Sounds like you care about him, you.”

“Not like that.” Gene sat down on the doorstep, concrete cold through his jeans. “I know the rules.”

Mémé Eva made an equivocating noise. “They ain't rules like that, cher. I met your papère when his back needed fixing, and he smiled so sweetly at me I thought my heart would forget how to beat.” She went quiet for a moment, and Gene could hear the clack of her rosary beads in the background. “But Eugène, cher, high emotion can drive you to make foolish decisions.”

Like risking your life to break a curse. After three years of hiding from your gift. “I’ve already opened the box,” Gene said heavily.

She sighed into the receiver, making the audio crackle in Gene’s ear. “Well. I suppose that's that, then.”

“I’m sorry, Mémé.”

“You _are_ a healer, mon Eugène. Don’t be sorry for being who you are. Maybe God was holding you back from it to save you for this curse.”

Cold washed through Gene, and he felt himself go stiff, even though he’d thought the same himself. “If God had anything to do with--why I left, then I don't want anything to do with Him.”

“Eugène--”

“No, Mémé, I’m. I’m not willing to talk about it. And I’ve got to go to work.”

“Bon,” his grandmother said softly. “But tell us how the curse breaking goes, huh? I don't want some stranger telling me un autre petit-enfant est mort.”

Gene swallowed through the lump in his throat. “My roommate, Renée, I’ll. If anything goes poorly I’ll make sure she calls you.”

“Renée? Is she a good French girl?”

“_Mémé_.” Gene buried his face in his free hand, the somber mood blasted utterly away. “You know I’m not that way about women.”

“I know, but it's in fashion with you young folk to be flexible.”

“Oh my God!”

“Language! You know how I want great-grandchildren, Eugène, and I’m not getting any younger--”

“Ask Marie!”

“Oh, I have! But she and her beau are content to take their time, so maybe I’ll be lucky and you’ll adopt.”

“I have to go,” Gene muttered into the space between his elbows.

“You do well at work, mon cher, and may God help you with your curse. I’ll pray to Him on your behalf, I’ll make sure the whole family will.”

Something small and bittersweet clenched in Gene’s heart. He doubted the _whole_ family would, not on his behalf, but he was glad his grandmother made the effort to make him feel better. Even just his grandmother’s prayers were a powerful aid.

“I have to go,” he said again, softer this time. “Thank you, Mémé.”

“Always, mon Eugène.”

It took him a minute to rein in the tears that wanted to fall. Three years since last he’d heard his grandmother’s voice; three long, lonely years. Maternal guilt and bad memories aside, Gene felt so immediately homesick he could barely breathe, and he hunched around the ache until it faded enough he could stand. He had to get to work.

“You okay, Gene?” Juan asked, when he was two hours into welding together busted heater parts.

“Rough night,” Gene answered, falling back on the excuse Renée had given him. He lifted his welding helmet and took a drink from his battered nalgene. 

“You need to break some kneecaps? ‘Cause me and my cousin, we can _assist_.”

Gene snorted a laugh almost by accident. “Not that kind of trouble.” He re-set the welding rod and ground clamp. He had three more of these corner joins to get through before he could switch to helping Frankie lay pipe solder, but they needed to be clean; the higher ups were coming down on Ulibarri’s head, and the more they came down on his head, the more he came down on his employees for “unnecessary waste.”

Juan was quiet for a moment. “Was it because of the gay thing?”

Juan was one of the electricians at Jimenez & Sons HVAC Repair. Gene had walked in one Monday almost two and a half years ago, proved he could weld on a busted condenser coil in front of the manager, and been hired on the spot. He hadn’t tried overly hard to hide his sexuality, but his reserve, combined with his low-key, unassuming competence, had rendered it a non-issue. Most people just wanted to get on with their lives.

“No,” he finally said. “It was other stuff. But busting kneecaps won’t fix it.”

“You sure? ‘Cause no one fucks with one of our own.”

Gene lowered his mask. “I’m alright.”

He just wanted to keep going forward. One weld, then another; one day, then another; one paycheck, then another. He wanted to finish the stack of books on his bedside table before it fell over and crushed him in his sleep; he wanted to see the next episode of Renée’s horrible show so he could have something to talk about that wasn’t just the featureless blank of his future. He didn’t especially want to get close to his coworkers. He’d tried that; it wasn’t what he needed.

Imminent threat of death aside, at least the puzzle had given him something new to look forward to. And if he didn’t finish in a week… win-win, really.

A week ago, a fucking _day_ ago, he might even have believed that. Then he’d met Babe Heffron. Then he’d talked to his mémé, and she said she’d pray for him.

He kicked on his torch and got to work. 

***

It was easier and harder, starting the puzzle the second night. Easier, because Gene knew what to expect. Harder, because he was tired. He lit the seven-day candle, he wrapped his mother’s rosary around his wrist, and with a heavy sigh, he fell into the healing trance.

Warmth filled him. Purpose drove him. His fingers sorted through the endless pile of puzzle pieces with an accuracy he couldn't have matched, had he been on his own. There was no hesitation in him, no wrong matches; every piece he put down against its neighbors was the right piece.

Time slipped. He was aware of Renée coming home, the clatter and fullness of her presence; he nodded absently when she addressed him, but it made no lasting impression. There was only the puzzle, and the feeling of Babe’s soul under his fingers.

He could feel it, now. The faint sense of Babe, the broken connections of his life and his terrible loneliness, but his underlying good humor and playfulness, too. He fitted himself against Gene even as Gene put him back together, and it wasn’t a bad fit at all.

A distant part of his mind heard Renée coming down the hall. “Gene, I’m going--” she cut off with a gasp, too choked to be a scream, but it jarred Gene from his concentration. He looked up.

Renée was in the walkthrough between the kitchen and the living room, her book bag over her shoulder, her bright dress and smiley-face earrings at odds with the raw horror on her face. “Gene,” she said.

He followed her gaze. The skeleton stood once more in the corner of the living room, though there was more to it, now: a beating heart throbbed in the rib cage. Its eye sockets were still empty as they turned to look at Gene, its grin wide and menacing. Then, like the night before, the candle blew out, the trance drained out of Gene, and the vision faded away.

“What was that!” Renée’s voice was high and strained, held back from panic by sheer will. “Gene, what was that!”

“Revenant,” he said, barely able to muster the energy to speak. “I think.”

She turned her attention properly to him, and at once she was beside him on the couch, checking his temperature with the back of her hand, testing his pulse. But Gene wasn't in imminent threat of dying, hah, so she eventually sat back and stared at him, a trembling, frightened expression on her face. “What's going on?”

Gene’s eyes flicked to the puzzle. The border was noticeably thicker than the night before. He sighed. “M’breakin’ a curse.”

Renée looked at him, then at the puzzle. Gene didn't know what she saw, but it couldn't look natural. She looked back to him. “Gene, you--you're not making sense. When was the last time you slept?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “Bed. Just… Lemme…” he dragged his leaden arms into position and tried to heave himself up, but it took Renée helping him to get upright. He was winded, and he hadn't even stood up, yet.

“Gene, I think we need to get you to a hospital, this isn't normal.”

He huffed a soundless, weak laugh. “Hospital won't help. Just sleep.” He ducked his head so he wouldn't have to look at her. It was already humiliating enough, to be seen this weak. “Think. Think I need help to get there.”

“Yeah, yeah if you’re sure it’s not… If you’re okay.”

“M’fine. Just tired.”

“Okay. I’ll just… okay.” She put her shoulder under his arm and hoisted, and it was just enough to let him get his feet under him. They staggered across the living room. They were about even in height, and probably in weight, if only because Gene, skinny as he was, was muscled down to the bone. His sister used to joke that if they tossed him into the swamp, he'd sink like a stone. Gene hadn't ever felt inclined to test it, but he definitely hadn't joined the high school swim team. Renée did alright with him, though.

He wasn't too tired to notice the fine tremor running through her. She put on a brave face, but she was scared. It was plain to see in the jittery way she looked around the room, the way she hesitated in the dark hallway.

“It won't come back,” Gene said.

Tension stiffened through Renée’s body, then slackened. “You're sure?”

“Pretty sure.” They made it to his doorway, and Gene forced himself to say the rest, even though sleep was plucking at him. “Think it's the curse victim. I’ll explain tomorrow.”

“You had better,” Renée said, as he slumped down onto the bed. Gene might have said something back, but sleep rose up so quickly he couldn't remember.

***

He was warm. Warm like he hadn’t been since Louisiana; the kind of heat that sank into your bones and baked away worries. He basked in it, drowsing, lazy and calm at heart in a way he hadn’t been for years. Water lapped against the sides of his boat. He must have taken the pirogue out to Long Pond. He’d have to get back home soon, his mama would need him to check the drying racks, and the laundry piles were climbing higher. But it could wait. Midges flitted overhead, chased by the heavier buzz of dragonfly wings, and every now and then a fish blew a bubble. Gene breathed in the heavy, muggy air, full of water and rot and the green scent of growing things. He drifted.

“Gene? Hey, Gene, is that you?”

Babe’s voice broke the idyll. Gene lurched up, dislodging the jars of moonshine that were lying against his legs, and the chill of knowledge flushed through him. He was dreaming, and he knew exactly which day this was.

“Hey, Gene! Over here!”

There, standing on a tiny island of mud, reeds, and one stubborn oak sapling, was Babe Heffron, sticking out like--like an américain couillon at a fais do do, bless his fool heart. Gene gaped at him, clutching at the sides of his hand-me-down pirogue, and tried, mostly without success, to scrape together a single, coherent thought.

Babe had been waving his arm, half to catch Gene’s attention and half in greeting, a wide smile on his face, but it faltered in the face of Gene’s baffled silence. “Hey, you gonna give me a ride, or what?”

Gene fumbled for the oar, heat prickling at his cheeks. For the curse to drag out this day, of all days--

But then, he’d seen Babe’s worst day. Fair was fair. A bubble of sick apprehension snuck up Gene’s throat, and he almost threw up right there in the water at the thought of what was coming.

“Hey, Gene,” Babe said as he got close. “You don’t look so good.” Then his eyes dropped to the brace of empty mason jars clinking around Gene’s knees, and his expression went grim. “You okay?”

Gene steadied the boat up against the soggy mat of moss and turf rather than look up at Babe. “No, I can’t say that I am.” He waited for Babe to get in, but he didn’t. Gene made himself look up.

Babe was wearing the same clothes he had in the last dream, a white dress shirt and high-waisted wool trousers. The shirt was unbuttoned at his throat, losing its starch in the dense bayou humidity. Sweat stains were spreading beneath his armpits. The sun struck his hair like one of his mama’s copper pots, and Gene really hadn’t had a chance.

“You coming or not?” he asked, his voice huskier than he’d meant.

Babe flushed bright red, starting like he’d been prodded in the ass. “Yeah, I’m coming, ain’t gonna stay here, I’d get eaten by a fucking alligator or something.” He edged up beside the boat with all the awkward distrust of someone who’d never set foot in one before. Gene watched, amused despite himself, and steadied it when Babe sat down--fell, really--on the other bench.

“Ain’t gonna let you spill out,” Gene said, nodding to Babe’s hands on the gunwales. “You can unclench.”

Babe blushed even more, unable to meet Gene’s gaze. Gene went back over what he’d said, and his own cheeks went hot, too. He hadn’t meant it like _that_. He cleared his throat. “You sit in a boat like you’re afraid it’s gonna buck you out.”

“Last boat I got on was the one that brought me home from Europe,” Babe replied. “That was enough for me.”

“Huh.” Somehow, it had never occurred to Gene that soldiers in WWII couldn’t just hop onto the nearest military airplane the way they could now. He busied himself with aiming the little pirogue back to shore. “What did you do before the war?”

“You mean like for a job?”

Gene shrugged.

Babe sat back a little, a look in his eye that might once have been cocky, but was tempered now to a low, fierce pride. “They didn’t call me up till August of ‘43, so for a while I worked converting regular ships to troop and supply transports. Sandblasting the paint off ‘em so they could be repainted. Before that… Eh. Bit of this, bit of that. Whatever odd jobs I could find. What about you, what do you do?” His eyes were intent; Gene didn’t think he meant what Gene did for a paycheck.

“Well.” Gene hedged. “Around this time, I worked on a shrimp boat.”

“A _shrimp_ boat?”

“Yeah, it’s like a fishing boat, only for shrimp.”

Babe rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, we got a wise guy, here. How the hell did you fall into that?”

Gene steered them around a submerged log. He could have gotten them to shore twice over already; Long Pond was a long, skinny pond, and the near bank wasn’t farther than a stone’s throw. But it was better to use the pier, and that was at the far end. Gene didn’t mind. Long Pond could grow two whole more miles long, if it kept him from facing the end of this dream. “Same way anyone falls into something,” he said. “I needed a job, and I knew the right people.” He looked back to Babe and caught him staring at his chest. Babe looked away, his ears red.

Gene looked down at himself. Ratty jeans, a threadbare t-shirt. It wasn’t even a white t-shirt, just a soft, faded gray, with BABINEAUX’S BAIT AND TACKLE silkscreened on it. But whatever Babe saw, he liked it. Gene thought of the dream the night before, and figured he’d go ahead and eye Babe right back. It had been a long fucking time since he’d let himself have fun.

“So, uh.” Babe avoided Gene’s gaze, his voice gone a little squeaky. “How’d--how’d you meet your girl?”

“My--what?” 

Babe swallowed. “Your girl, you--you mentioned her last time, said you lived with her.” 

Gene slowly lowered the oar until it rested against the gunwale. “She’s just my roommate.”

“Yeah, your ‘roommate,’ I get it.” Babe ran a nervous hand through his hair. “Look, I’m not gonna judge or anything. I’m sure she’s… nice.” He glanced at Gene, a brief flick of his eyes, before he was back contemplating the lily pads. “You don’t gotta front with me.”

Well, that was. Gene cycled through a number of descriptors before settling on “unwelcome.” “Okay,” he said, giving a couple good strokes through the water to let off some of the pressure building inside him. “She is not my girlfriend, we are not married, we do not have sex. There is no expectation between us that we ever _will_ have sex. We split rent because living in Philadelphia is fucking expensive, and I get enough assumptions from my family, I don’t need them from you, too.”

“Shit, okay,” Babe said, his eyes wide. “Not your girl, got it.” His smile went sleazy, but it was a little too forced for Gene to buy it. “Does that mean she’s available?”

Christ have mercy, he had better things to do than handle Babe Heffron’s old-timey bullshit. He raked Babe from top to bottom and back up with a glance. “You sure you want _her_?”

Babe went still as a mouse, and all the blood drained out of his face. He licked his lips. “Wh-what are you trying to say, here, Gene, that I--”

Gene leaned forward--not too fast, you didn’t want to move too fast in a boat--and cupped the back of Babe’s head to kiss him. Just a dry press of lips, nothing too threatening, but firm enough to get the point across without scaring Babe away. He sat back on his side, his lips tingling. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Babe’s eyes were wide around as hubcaps. Gene’s heart pounded as he waited to see what he’d do. He was from the Forties, but how closeted was he?

“Just like that?” Babe finally said, sounding completely lost.

Gene had no fucking clue what he meant. “Yeah,” he said anyway. “Just like that.”

Babe stared at him for a heartbeat longer. “Fuck!” he finally yelled. “Fuck! Fuck this _fucking_ curse!” He kicked the side of the boat, rocking it to hell and back and sending empty jars willy-nilly.

“Hey!” Gene barked. “Don’t you kick my boat, or you’re swimming to shore!”

“Jesus Christ, I--” Babe dropped his face into his hands. “Fuck.”

He sat there, bent over his knees, and Gene slowly let go of the gunwales. As close as they were, he couldn’t really miss it when Babe gave a wet sniff.

Ah, fuck.

It was Gene’s turn to inspect the water lilies, giving Babe space to pull himself together. They were unusually vivid, soft pinks and shocks of purple, and they almost carpeted the still places of in the water, marking out by their absence the hidden currents of Long Pond. Gene imagined he was one of them, with no purpose or thought but to burrow deep in the mud and shelter fish. They definitely didn’t have to worry about making a grown man cry. 

“Why the fuck did you have to open the puzzle,” Babe said, in a soft, broken voice.

Gene shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

Babe sat up with a heavy sigh, his eyes red but his cheeks dry. “What’s that supposed to mean, huh? You never actually said what you do.”

For three years straight, Gene had kept his silence. Not a word to anyone about his family, who he was, what he did. He’d kept it all bottled up inside him and sealed it away. He stared at Babe, and Christ, he’d popped the fucking seal with the puzzle box lid, but now that he wanted to talk, nothing fucking came out. “You’ll see soon enough,” he finally said. If there was an upside to this curse, it was that matters would apparently be taken out of his hands whether he spilled the beans or not.

All of a sudden, dusk fell over Long Pond. Just like that: the sky darkened like a dimmer switch, and the frogs started up their evening chorus. Gene sucked in a shaky breath.

“Gene,” Babe said, his tone gone urgent. “Whatever I’m about to see, I’m sorry.”

There was the pier, and the long, winding trail through the woods back to town. Gene steered the pirogue toward it. “You didn’t curse yourself.”

“Still ain’t my business. If there was any other way, I’d do it.”

Gene let the boat float up to the pier, then looked at Babe. His long face had turned mysterious and elegant in the shadows, like all the stories of fey women luring men away to their doom. Gene tried to imagine what it must have been like, to be Babe Heffron. To survive a world war only to kill a man by accident on his home soil and be cursed for it. To have his worst moments dragged out into the light for anyone who tried to help him, and worse, to be forced to witness their own in return. And four had already died for their kindness.

He didn’t think the urge through. He leaned forward to cup Babe’s cheek in his hand, and then he kissed him a second time, beneath a curtain of moss and the soft moonlight of a late Louisiana spring.

“Why?” Babe asked when Gene pulled back, his expression full of wonder and fear.

Gene licked the taste of him from his lips. “I wanted to.” He ran his fingers through the short bristle of Babe’s hair, back and forth. It was always a surprise how soft hair could be.

“You don’t think--” Babe pulled himself up short. “It’s not just the curse talking?”

Gene kissed him again, soft as cottonwood fluff on the water. “Nah.”

Babe shivered, a full-body quake of repressed emotion, and Gene pressed his case, pressed his lips more firmly against Babe’s, parting them just enough to trap Babe’s lower lip and pull ever-so-slightly, and the noise Babe made, soft and a little desperate, burned heat from Gene’s ears straight down to the pit of his belly. 

Maybe he was a little desperate, too. It felt so good to kiss someone, to be close to another body, and Babe, once he got his head in the game, was a good kisser. Maybe if they kissed long enough, if Gene lost himself in the featherlight, tingling touch of their tongues, he could forget where he was, what they were about to see.

But then Babe knelt forward off his seat, and his knee landed on an empty jar instead of the hull. He slipped; he landed heavily against the gunwale, and Gene had to move quickly and balance them against the pier, or they would have overturned.

“Fuck!” Babe yelped, his arm soaked almost to the shoulder.

“What’d you brace against the water for!” Gene laughed. Actually laughed, suddenly and so hard he was barely upright himself, still clutching the back of Babe’s shirt. “You think you were the Second Coming, or something?”

“Shut up!” Babe yelled back, flinging water at him. “Next time I’m dragging you with me!”

“Fuck no, I’m drowning your ass first. You don’t wanna swim in Long Pond, no sir.”

Babe looked nervously at the water, like it would rise up and drown him, boat or no. “Alligators?”

Gene had mostly recovered, but that set him off again. “No,” he gasped, sagging back against the stern. “Leeches!”

“_Leeches_?”

One--no, two deep breaths and Gene could speak. “Yeah, you don’t know regret until you’ve pulled leeches off your pecker.” The expression on Babe’s face dissolved Gene’s fragile composure like sugar in the rain.

“You’re shitting me, right? Gene--come on, cut that out, you’re not serious, right?”

Gene wiped away tears. “Your face, oh my God!”

“Gene!”

“I’m not shitting you, no.” Gene cleared his throat, getting control of himself. “There’s leeches in Long Pond, and they _will_ bite anywhere that gets underwater.”

A heartbeat passed, and then Babe yanked at his shirtsleeve, twisting his elbow to and fro, looking for leeches. “What the _fuck_ do people live here for!”

“City boy,” Gene said, overcome by fondness as Babe worked himself into a fret. “Here.” He caught Babe’s flailing hand and plucked a black little worm from between his fingers. He held it up for Babe to see before flinging it into the water.

Babe screeched in outrage. “Are you fucking kidding me! That’s it, I’m done! You better wake up, Gene, because I’m done with this swamp bullshit!”

Gene just smiled. “Did they name you ‘Babe’ ‘cause you’re a baby? ‘Cause you’re acting like one.”

“I’m _bleeding_!” He held up his hand for Gene to see the tiny trickle of blood from the leech’s bite.

Gene took his wrist again, squinting to see the--it wasn’t even a wound, it was barely a scratch--better in the moonlight. He turned Babe’s hand this way and that. “Is that all.” Babe had nice hands. Long fingers. His knuckles were a little knobbly, but not in a bad way. Gene smoothed his own fingers over Babe’s, feeling the shift of sinew and bone. 

“Yeah,” Babe said, much quieter and slightly breathless. 

“Guess I better fix it, then.” Gene wasn’t in the habit of using his gift to impress cute boys, and strictly speaking, he shouldn't; but as endearing as Babe’s fussing was, he had to learn sooner or later. Maybe actions would get the job done, since Gene couldn't get the words out. He brushed his thumb over the bite. “Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce, le Seigneur est avec vous…” The warmth of God filled him, and by the time he said the final words, the bite was gone.

“Huh.” Babe sounded like he was at his wit’s end.

Gene smiled half a smile. “How’s your hand?”

It took a moment for Babe to pry his eyes away from Gene’s face, but eventually he did, and he looked down at his hand. The little smear of blood was still there, but the bite was gone. Babe turned his hand this way and that, as though the bite might have moved when he wasn’t looking, but Gene did his healing clean, and there wasn’t a mark left to see.

Gene licked his lips. “You want to know what I do? That’s it. Me’n my family, all of us.”

“What, heal people?”

Gene just nodded. He wasn’t in the habit of explaining traitement; down in the bayou, people just knew. Rain on St. Medard’s Day meant a bad hurricane season, leeches lived in Long Pond, and the Verrets were the best traiteurs in Assumption Parish, and the next parish over in any direction, too.

Eventually Babe put his hand down and stared at Gene. “Okay,” he said. “Why not.”

The sound of running feet cut through the heavy silence. “Gene! Gene, you there?”

Gene’s body clenched up, adrenaline sharpening the moment until he thought he might break. “Paul, that you?” he asked, speaking the words straight from his memory.

A rangy boy of fifteen wheeled around the copse protecting the pier from sight, mud on his knees and scrapes on his elbows, and how Gene remembered this day. Everything after was a blur, but this day, oh, he remembered it so well he could dream it up, couldn’t he.

“Yeah, it’s me, Gene! Where you been? Mama needs you! Heya, Babe,” he said as an afterthought, taking the rope Gene threw him and tying it off.

“Hi,” Babe said cautiously. “This kid a friend of yours, Gene?”

“He’s my cousin,” Gene replied tersely, ignoring Babe’s shocked expression in favor of stowing the oar and clambering out of the boat. “First cousin on my mama’s side, c’mon, take my hand.” He hauled Babe out onto the pier, and just like that, Paul was off running.

“It’s Thomasine,” he yelled over his shoulder, scarcely waiting for them to follow. “She got in the way of a logger, Mama tried to heal her, but she already went out to the McMurtrys today--”

“Fuck,” Gene said, picking up the pace, the old wash of terror burning through him again. He ran straight and steady this time, no weaving or staggering, no need for Paul to stop and drag him back upright. Babe ran just behind him, a strange presence, but a warm one; his breathing was steady as Aunt Laure’s metronome, like he could run all day. Gene’s was short and burned in his lungs with the tang of fear.

Aunt Irene lived on the other side of town from Long Pond, but this was a dream, and instead of leading Gene through the ordeal of public, staggering drunkenness like he had in the past, Paul led Gene the hundred yards to Gene’s own house: a creaky shotgun shack older than Gene’s grandparents with a raised herb garden in the back and his brother’s old Dodge rusting out in the side yard. The part of Gene’s brain that wasn’t whited out and dumb with shock wondered what had happened to his house. If the family had sold it after he’d run away north, or if they’d held onto it.

“In here.” Paul ushered them into what had been Gene’s kitchen, but was now Aunt Irene’s back workroom. And now, just like then, Gene knew it was too late.

“Where you been?” Aunt Irene said quietly, her hands brushing through her daughter’s blood-and-dirt smeared hair. Thomasine lay spread on the worktable where in better days Irene compounded herbs for remèdes. Now those remèdes were smeared over Thomasine’s skin, over bruises and crushed bones. Gene could see evidence of healings, with his eyes and his soul, but he could also see his cousin, no more than thirteen, an infectiously happy gift to a family of tired, cynical healers--silent and still on a slab.

“You’re no kind of traiteur, Gene Roe,” Irene continued, still in that soft, gentle voice, her eyes fixed on her daughter. “Too wrapped up in your own damn self to think about your responsibilities.” 

“Mama,” Paul said, his voice shocked and small. Gene could have thanked him for it; should have, in the past, but he’d been knocked on his ass with drink and shock. A thread of anger filled him now, as it had then: it was the one-year anniversary of his mother’s death, and if he was allowed any day to get drunk, it was this one. He opened his mouth to say as much, as he had in the past, but Irene cut him off.

“And you!” This she spat at Babe, who had edged as close to the door as possible with the acute discomfort of someone confronted by family drama not their own. “Babe Heffron, you were supposed to get him! Or were you too busy fucking the sorrow out of your precious _Doc_?”

Babe, already sallow from looking at Thomasine’s small, broken body, lost what color was left in his cheeks. “What?”

“You leave him be!” Gene spat, shame and anger battling it out with the sheer confusion rattling through his brain. “He wasn’t even there!”

“He _should_ have been!” Irene was well past rationality. She was a mother lion confronted with the death of one of her cubs. “He should have been there, and you should have, too!”

“Well, I’m here now! You want me to work, or you gonna spit venom a little longer?”

That seemed to shock Irene into silence. She looked up at Gene through her tears, then to her son. Paul was standing in the corner, his dark cheeks gray with fear. “It’s too late,” she said. “But if you think you can do something, traiteur, you go ahead and do it.” She stood back from the table, her arms crossed before her. Her child was gravely wounded; she was herself unable to help, and was forced to rely on--well, Gene. 

He tried his best. That’s all he could say, in the aftermath; he tried his best, but when it came down to it, his best wasn’t good enough. The warmth of God was in him, but it wasn’t enough. Gene’s hands fluttered over Thomasine’s splintered ribs, gently picked bits of bark out of the tight curls of her hair, but the healing heat didn’t fill him like it ought, and he felt the life drain out of Thomasine Catreau like water between his fingers.

He staggered back into silence and cold. The muggy delta heat was rising to its summer peak, and Gene was cold down to his bones.

“Get out,” Irene said quietly.

Gene stared at her. He felt disconnected to his body; he was half in memory, wholly in dream, and he remembered so acutely what it felt like to share his cousin’s death that he shook with it. He fought to wake, to escape it, but the curse had him fast.

“Get out!” Irene screamed, her arms unfolding and reaching for the nearest jar--homemade pickles, spillover from her pantry. Gene barely flinched when it shattered over his shoulder, splashing his back with brine and a delicate patter of broken glass.

“Gene, Jesus Christ, come on!” Babe’s warm hand on his arm dragged him back to himself, and he staggered after him out the back door to his own backyard, and Gene couldn’t--reality was warping, he couldn’t think--

“Hey,” Babe said, and all at once Gene was back to himself, standing beside the herb bed, built up from deadfall and pieces of the old roof, after he’d paid his brother and a handful of friends a six-pack each to help him replace it. “Hey,” Babe said again, reaching out for Gene with a horrible, gentle expression on his face. Gene pulled away, wrapping his arms around himself, clutching the worn fabric of his t-shirt in his hands.

He didn’t deserve kindness like that. He was a drunkard, a useless layabout. Irene’s words echoed in his mind’s ear, loud as the bells of Our Lady of Assumption: _You’re no kind of traiteur, Gene Roe_.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low and cracking from the emotion he wouldn’t let out. “You deserve someone who can actually help you.”

In the house, the rising sound of Irene’s grief was salt in the bleeding wound of his shame.

In reality, three years ago in the past, Gene had run from Irene’s house and packed a bag and hitched a ride to New Orleans. Now, in the dream, Gene had nowhere to run. He’d already run as far as he could, and here he was, right back where he started. He twined his fingers together behind his neck, dragging at his skin, trying to find some way to--there wasn’t room in his body for all he was feeling, it was too Goddamn much.

“Miserere mei, Deus,” he whispered in despair. “Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea.” 

Babe sucked in a sharp breath. “No, come on,” he said, sounding wholly out of his depth, but with a surety Gene… envied. Oh, how he longed for it. Babe turned him to face him. “Look,” he said. “This’ll eat you alive if you let it, Gene. I know, okay? I _know_.”

“You know, huh? You ever kill a kid?” Gene spat with all the hurt in his body.

“Yeah, I have,” Babe replied, blunt as a brick to the head. “And I can’t even say they were all Nazis, because a lot were Polish conscripts.” He rubbed Gene’s arms. “I don’t got a way to make it hurt less, either. You find one, you tell me, okay?”

Gene swayed toward him before he caught himself, and he made himself pull away. Finally, _finally_, consciousness beckoned. He reached for it with both hands.

“Goddamn it, Gene,” he heard Babe sigh, the last thing he heard before he was awake in his bed, tangled in his blankets and panting at the ceiling.

He didn’t cry.


	3. Chapter 3

Renée was waiting for him in the kitchen when he finally staggered out, an empty plate of toast crumbs sitting before her on the table. They stared at each other for a long, agonizing moment before Renée broke the silence.

“You were shouting. In your sleep.”

“Bad dream,” Gene replied, emotionally uneven and already worn out.

Renée bit her lip and looked away. “What happened to your wrist?”

Gene looked down, to the freshly washed and bandaged scratches on his arm. “A curse memory,” he said, knowing that explained exactly nothing.

Renée’s tense expression went a little more clenched. “You said that last night. A curse.” Her question was unspoken, but it was deafening, nonetheless.

“I did.” Gene’s head felt like it was stuffed with cotton; his eyes were itchy, his nose plugged. He didn’t want to have this conversation, but it needed to be had. He started toward the cupboard with the glasses, then veered at the last minute to the coffee cabinet. “You want some?”

“No, thank you.”

He hesitated. Renée was going through Physician Assistant school, and she lived on caffeine. Maybe she didn't want _him_ to--

He cut that line of thought off at the pass and filled the kettle. Heat the water, grind the beans, measure the grounds. It was a familiar ritual, one he’d done so many times he could do it without thinking. Which bought him time to think about what to tell Renée, instead. To resign himself to revealing truths he’d kept hidden and airless for close to three years.

Did it count when you told them in a dream?

Thomasine’s face rose up in his mind’s eye, and his hand slipped, dumping coffee grounds over the counter instead of into the press. He hastily swept them into the trash. Fuck, he was a wreck of a human. He braced himself against the counter while he waited for the kettle to boil.

“I’m a traiteur,” he finally said, out loud in reality. Naming himself.

Renée took a deep breath and let it out. “You're… a caterer?”

Gene thunked his head against the cabinets. “Treater. I’m a _treater_.”

He expected her to go on her usual tongue-in-cheek rant about Cajun versus “real” French, like a second-generation Belgian immigrant would even know real French if it jumped up and bit her in the ass, but she didn’t. Gene swallowed. He pried his forehead off the cabinet and stood back upright.

“I guess you could call it faith healing. We pray, lay on hands, and the person is healed.”

If it hadn’t been for the soft whoosh of the stove, the silence would have been oppressive.

“Okay,” Renée finally said.

And Gene knew, he _knew_, that she had just recategorized him from “generally sane” to “broken-from-reality religious.” He knew how that silence sounded.

The kettle finally whistled, and Gene poured it over the grounds. “I don’t mean placebo. I pray, and the sickness is healed. Rashes, asthma, chronic pain. Colds, if I want to bother with them.” Sometimes he could heal congenital deformities, but not always. Mental illness, almost never--if it wasn't something built-in, then more often than not it was tied to the person’s situation, and not something he could fix. But he could ease the symptoms.

“You don’t--” He could hear the restrained outrage in Renée’s voice. “You don’t take people away from actual medical care?”

Gene snorted. “You know how many people in Belle River can afford a doctor? We say, ‘go to the clinic when it’s big or needs surgery. Go to a traiteur for everything else.’ And at least remèdes aren’t addictive.” He glanced over his shoulder, but Renée’s expression was closed off. He turned back to the press. “I’m not God. I can’t cure what the patient don’t want healed. And I--I can’t cure death.”

“Well, at least you have limits.” She didn’t try to hide the sarcasm.

Gene poured his coffee with shaking hands. “C’mon.” He led her out to the living room, and he didn’t miss the way she flinched when he turned on the overhead light. “So you remember,” he said softly.

She scowled, but didn’t say anything.

Gene shrugged. “Lotta people choose to forget.”

“It was a glowing skeleton, Gene, it was pretty memorable!”

“What else do you remember?”

Her eyes fell to the puzzle and caught fast.

“Yeah,” Gene said. “Tell me what’s weird about it.”

Renée glanced at him. “What?”

He nodded. “You’re weirded out by it, so tell me why. List every weird thing going on with it.”

“I…” She glanced to Gene, and he nodded her on, taking a sip of his coffee. “Well, I, I’ve never seen one that big before.”

“Could be a specialty puzzle.” Gene took another sip, clinging to the warmth and thinking of Babe’s hands.

She frowned at him, and he heard the cogs of rationalization ticking. “The way you’ve been acting, the past couple days,” she said slowly. “Like you’re afraid. But the only thing different is the puzzle. Is it something to do with--with the mob, or something?”

Gene smiled despite himself. “It’s not the mob.”

“Are you in debt? Gene,” she said, her voice going gentle. “Did you see the doctor recently?”

“Christ Almighty.” He pushed off to sit on the couch. A twinge of concern from the puzzle; “Ease off,” he told Babe. “Not doing shit this morning, don’t worry.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Not you,” he said shortly. His mother’s rosary was still around his unbandaged wrist. He fingered the crucifix. “Last night, what did you see?”

Her lips pressed together. “It was late, I was seeing things.”

“Oh, _now_ you’re gonna forget?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Gene! It was insane, it couldn’t have been real!”

“It was as real as any dream you’ve ever had,” he said in reply.

“Dreams aren’t real!”

“No? They’re the product of real memories and emotions, mixed with the interplay of real chemicals and electricity. Just because they don’t make sense don’t mean they’re not real!”

“So…” Renée’s face crumpled in confusion. “I was dreaming?”

Gene put his head in his hands. “No. I, I’m not doing this right.” He stared at the puzzle. “This puzzle doesn’t have joins between the pieces,” he said, reciting everything in a tired, drained voice. He took a handful of loose pieces and dropped them on the table so they’d clatter together. “They sound like bone, not cardboard. Piggy hasn’t come into the living room _once_ since I cracked it open, the picture is, God, you can see it, and here, read the box.” He handed the lid off to her. She looked it over just like he had, her eyes widening at the gore splatter on the front. She flipped it over. “‘My name is Edward Heffron,’” she read aloud, her frown deepening. “‘I killed a man, and now I’m paying the price’? Gene, what is this?”

“Flip it over,” he said, hoping beyond hope that Babe cooperated.

Her startled gasp sent shocks of tired relief through him. “The picture changed!”

“Yeah,” Gene said. “He does that.”

“_He_?”

“Edward Heffron, the man who was cursed.”

“No.” Renée shook her head. She dropped the puzzle box like it was a poison snake. “No. This is crazy, Gene, it’s _crazy_.”

“And it’s true,” Gene replied. He understood, he really did.

“I have to get to class,” she said with a shaking voice. She grabbed her keys and backpack. “I’ll--I’ll be home tonight.”

He considered saying it would be okay, but he wasn’t that much of a liar. He’d brought dangerous magic into their house and started off a chain of events that would end, one way or another, in four days. Renée had a right to some answers. “I’ll be here,” he replied dully.

She left him there, staring into his cooling mug of coffee. Just him, Piggy, and the puzzle, alone in a musty apartment.

He had work in an hour. Thank fuck the commute was quick. He downed the rest of his coffee and went to get ready. 

***

Renée wasn’t home when he got in that night. Gene wasn’t worried, at first. PA school was a bitch, from what little he understood; she was probably at a study group.

But then he realized Piggy wasn’t there, either, standing on the counter and meowing pointedly at his bowl. 

Gene’s breath caught, a low, simmering fear kindling in his belly. He didn’t own Renée, of course. They were roommates, maybe friends; they didn’t have any stronger claim than that, and Gene had just dropped a very large grenade into the middle of their carefully balanced life. He didn’t have any right to how she felt, and if she didn’t feel safe being in the same space as him, then… that was her prerogative. He tossed his coat over his bed, and the cuff caught on the bandage on his wrist. Gene hissed at the pull, but what the hell, he had to clean it anyway.

The scratches were red and swollen. He washed them as carefully as possible--they were scabbing up well enough, but it had been a couple days, and the heat and redness wasn’t going down. If they didn’t start getting better, he’d probably have to soak off the scabs in a salt water bath, see if that didn’t sort him out. In the meantime, he found an old length of 90mph cord, tied knots along it until it made a proper cordon, and tied that just below his elbow. If the scratches got infected, that would keep it contained. For a while, at least. 

He went back into the living room. It was so quiet without Renée swearing at her textbooks or Piggy chasing his bell toy. Gene had grown up surrounded by the noises of others. If he hadn’t been staying at a relative’s house, they were staying at his. It wasn’t until he’d moved up to Pennsylvania that he’d been alone for any great stretch of time, and that had mostly ended when he’d met Renée a year in.

He went to the kitchen and rustled up something socially acceptable as dinner, ate it over the sink rather than bother with the niceties of sitting down at the table. Washed his dishes while he had the momentum. He remembered moods like this; if he didn’t do it now, he’d never do it, and then it’d weigh on him ten times worse. 

By then, the sky was darkening outside, the living room cast in shadows. Gene just stood there for a while, drifting. Sometimes, he thought maybe it’d be nice to stop existing. Just… stop. Then he wouldn’t have to worry if he fucked up the last halfway decent relationship in his life.

He sighed. Turned on the lamp on the side table. Sat on the couch in front of the puzzle, and sighed again. Like fuck he wanted to jump in this again. God literally only knew what shit the curse would make him see next, but on the other hand… 

On the other hand, the healing trance was the nicest Gene had felt in years. 

He curled forward and buried his face in his hands. Jesus _Christ_. How could he think that? How could he even dare? Healing was to help others, not to make himself feel better. What kind of wretch was he, that he’d thought of himself before Babe? He had a decent apartment in a decent city, he had a decent job and he wasn’t fucking _cursed_. He had no business feeling this bad for himself. He smoothed the heels of his hands back from his eyes and linked his fingers behind his head. The puzzle stared back up at him.

_You’re no kind of traiteur, Gene Roe_.

Maybe so. But he Goddamn well finished what he started, and Babe was depending on him. His hands shook as he lit the candle. As he pulled his mother’s rosary out of his pocket, where he carried it all the time, now, and slipped it around his wrist. “Kyrie eléison,” he murmured, in the plainchant he’d learned as a choirboy. “Kyrie eléison, kyrie eléison.”

It was a blessed relief, to be parted from the pain of his own mind. Tension smoothed out of Gene’s neck and back; he sat up and reached for the pieces, purpose and certainty moving him. He was God’s tool and did the work of His hands. 

Time passed; the puzzle grew. Gene rested in the care of God, and for a short time, he forgot. 

***

A burst of light flashed overhead, washing Gene’s vision white. He froze midstep, clenching his hands in his pockets, and looked up. His breath caught. A falling star hovered above him, framed by the reaching, slender points of pine trees and a black night sky. His breath clouded before him; the trees were rimed white. Even after three years in the frozen wastes of Pennsylvania, he hadn’t seen anything like it.

“Doc, get down!” someone whisper-hissed behind him. Gene didn’t recognize the voice. He turned to see who it was, and in fading light overhead, he saw snow, so much snow, but also dirty trails that led to holes in the ground, and the lumpy, helmeted shapes of men huddled within.

“Jesus _Christ_,” someone else spat. A pair of hands grabbed Gene by the back of his coat and started hauling him away, toward one of the holes in the ground, and the only reason Gene didn't deck him was because high-caliber, automatic gunfire lit off in the distance, and getting to cover all of a sudden seemed like a great idea.

They tumbled into the hole right as a hail of bullets hit the tree trunks behind them. “Tryin’ to kill yourself, Doc?” the other man demanded.

It was only then that Gene recognized the military uniform the man was wearing. Gene had seen enough WWII movies to vaguely recognize it, and even if he hadn't--he was sharing dreams with a veteran. He could connect the dots.

He was wearing a uniform, too. One with a bright red cross on the sleeve.

“Should know better than to stand up like that,” the man was saying, hunkering himself down into his coat. His accent was thick with Philadelphia, like Babe’s, but his ragged beard was black, not red. “Germans only light up a flare if they’re about to shoot.”

“Sorry,” Gene said.

“Don’t fuckin’ apologize, just don’t do it again. The fuck were you even up and around for, anyway? Didn’t hear nobody screamin’ for a medic.”

“Looking for Babe Heffron,” Gene replied, making an educated guess. He’d never been cold like this in his life. He wouldn’t have worn this jacket for winter in Louisiana, let alone winter in… wherever in Europe they were.

The man snorted. “You get turned around lookin’ at that flare or somethin’? His hole’s that way, same as always. But hey, Doc, since you’re here, you got any penicillin in yet?”

Gene went still and careful. “No, why?”

“_Why_? Come on, you was the one saying I needed it in the first place!”

“Well I don’t got any,” Gene shot back, and as far as he knew, it was the truth. “‘Less you’re bad enough to go off the line.”

_Off the line?_

“No,” the man said, his demeanor calming immediately. “No, it ain’t that bad. Nothin’ ol’ Gonorrhea can’t handle.”

Gene stared at him, nonplussed. That sounded worthy of a trip to the hospital to him, but it wasn’t his junk that was rotting.

Overhead, the flare burned out, and the forest--battlefield?--was plunged into darkness.

“There you go, Doc,” the still-unnamed man said. “Go find Babe.”

“I’ll see about that penicillin,” Gene said in reply, climbing out of the cold, muddy hole into the even colder air above it. He stood hunched for a moment, trying to orient himself in the dark.

“That way,” the man said, pointing again.

Gene nodded, the webbing inside his helmet digging into his head as he did. “Thanks.” He followed the mud-and-slush track the man had pointed out, keeping hunched and feeling like a dumbass about it, but none of the men in the foxholes he passed made any comment other than low “Heya, Doc”s and soft invitations for a cuppa joe.

Gene passed them all by, following now the same kind of pull that had drawn him to the puzzle in the bookstore. Babe was _that_ way; he knew it regardless of the trees blocking his view, or the tarp-covered foxhole he nearly walked into.

The farther he went, the more the track thinned out, and so did the trees. After a certain point, there were only broken stumps and the odd lone pine. Then a slow dip in the ground, leading down to what Gene thought might be a road or stream in summer, and beyond: another bank of trees, lit sporadically by bobbing lights and flashes of moonlight on metal. He could smell grease cooking, in those far distant woods.

Before the edge of the trees, though, was another foxhole. A man sat in it, bundled into a blanket and cradling a wooden-stock rifle like it was his firstborn. Gene couldn’t see any more than the top of his helmet and the suggestion of shoulders, but he knew: that man was Babe.

“Hey,” he said, crouching down as he made his way closer to no man’s land.

Babe turned. “Gene?”

“Everything all right?”

“Shit, I should be asking you that, the fuck are you doing here?”

Gene slid down into the hole beside him. “‘Nother dream, I imagine.”

“Huh.” Babe seemed to have relaxed now that Gene was down next to him in the hole, but he was still tense. “Don’t think I ever _stop_ dreaming in here.”

“Three days down,” Gene said.

Babe heaved a sigh, tilting his head back. “Don’t I know it. Hurts before it gets better, you know?”

Gene didn’t, but he shrugged. “I’d make it easier on you if I knew how.”

“No way, Gene, don’t even worry about it. Those times when you work on the puzzle, fuck, feels like I’m waking up for the first time in seventy years. Like--” he shifted, his knee pressing warm against Gene’s thigh through the thin fabric of their trousers. They locked eyes. “Like you know how your eyes hurt when you open them in bright light? It’s like that. ‘Cept it’s my whole body.”

His cheeks were pink, his eyes intent. Slow heat spilled though Gene’s chest, down his spine, butterflies taking off in his innards. Babe’s _whole body_ sounded better than it should, given how fucking cold it was and how dirty they both were. It hit Gene like a wave: he was _disgusting_. He could smell himself, sharp and acrid; his skin felt coated, and his hair was heavy. And next to him, Babe smelled even worse. There were stains on Babe’s coat that Gene was pretty sure weren’t dirt, but Gene couldn’t complain, because the cuffs of his own coat were solid brown with dried blood. He shuddered, his hands going stiff in his pockets.

Babe started laughing. “Holy shit,” he said. “You’re dressed like a medic. I just noticed.”

“Don’t look at me,” Gene said. “This dream’s on you.”

Babe laughed so hard he snorted like a pig, and that set him off even worse. “Why not, right! You’re a--a whatsit, a traitor--”

“_Traiteur_,” Gene corrected testily.

“Yeah, s’what I said, a traitor, you heal people, right? That’s basically how we saw the medics.” He sobered up abruptly. “They kept us sane, Gene. We all kept each other sane, but we _needed_ the medics. We all knew sooner or later we’d get shot, I got fuckin’ shot my first Goddamn day, and the medics were all that stood between us and buyin’ the farm.”

Gene chewed on that for a while. He knew what it was to save lives; he’d done it more than he’d failed, even if--if the failures hit harder. Modern medicine was a beautiful thing, but not everyone in Louisiana trusted the white medical establishment. To be _needed_ in that way, though, to have your every day threatened with bodily harm, and to be forced to trust in the skill of a handful of people to keep you from dying? Gene could barely fathom it. He looked at the cross on his armband and tried to imagine that level of trust and responsibility, but all he could think of was the light going out in Thomasine’s eyes.

“Lemme see your hand,” he said abruptly, pulling Babe’s hand out from under his armpit.

“My--okay?” Babe let himself be manhandled, let Gene hold his hand up so he could see where the leech had bitten him.

It was hard to tell beneath the grime. Gene almost licked his thumb to wipe it away, but then he got a good look at his thumb, and the dark streaks caked around his fingernail. He grimaced and settled for running his fingers over the place where the bite had been. It was smooth and unbroken, save for where the skin was chapped.

He sighed and let Babe’s hand drop. It wasn’t like it was real, anyway. It was a dream, a _curse_ dream, and continuity wasn’t a priority in either scenario, let alone both at once.

“Think one of your soldiers has an STI,” he finally said, just for something to say.

“What’s that?” Babe asked.

Gene’s thoughts screeched to a halt. “A sexually transmitted infection,” he said slowly.

“Oh, you mean VD.”

Gene relaxed. “Yeah.”

Babe snorted. “Just one? Shit, they must be falling down on the job.”

Gene gave him an incredulous look. He wasn’t a naif, he’d treated a fair amount of indiscretions in his time, but to be that blasé about it?

“You wanna talk about funny faces,” Babe said with a chuckle. “But Gene, we ain’t actually seen any women in about a month, so I don’t know how in the hell anyone could have caught something.”

Gene twisted to the side to look Babe face-on as best he could. “Are you joking, right now?”

“Hand to God, it's been a month.”

“No, not that.” Gene rolled his eyes. “You’re gonna tell me nobody here got itchy with each other?”

Babe went very, very still. Gene went still, too; it occurred to him that he didn’t actually know that much about Babe. Not so much his sexuality, Gene had a decent guess about that, but how _Babe_ thought of it. How far he’d go to protect his self-image. 

“I guess you’re… like that,” Babe finally said, unsure and hesitant. He swallowed, and looked at Gene out of the corner of his eye. “Too?”

“Queer as a three-dollar bill,” Gene replied, as confidently as he could. He was pretty confident, but he wanted Babe to see and be reassured. “It’s different in the future.”

“Yeah?” Babe’s caution was heartbreaking.

“Yeah.” Gene took a moment to sort through his words. He wanted to get it right. “We know more about human sexuality, now. People don’t control who they’re attracted to, it’s wired in with everything else. I’ve got black hair, double jointed elbows, and I like sucking cock.”

Babe gave a throttled, nervous laugh. “Jesus Christ, don’t say shit like that.”

“It’s true.”

Babe didn’t have a reply to that. He looked uneasily at Gene, then over his shoulder, toward the rest of his unit, before turning back to the front. He chewed at his lip. “There’s--there’s a fella in the HQ company. One’a the clerks. Ain’t seen him much lately, but when we was stationed in Holland, we, uh.” He glanced to Gene. “Y’know. Had a thing going. Just helping each other out, y’know? In the dry spells.”

Gene nodded, staring fixedly at the line of snow over the edge of the foxhole. “Friends with benefits.”

Babe snorted. “Yeah, sure. Without the friends part.”

The silence stretched. “Men can get married now,” Gene said, the first thing that came to mind. “Women, too.”

“We can get married _now_,” Babe said, confused.

“No, I mean two men can marry each other. Or two women.”

Babe went quiet at that. 

“Marry, adopt kids together. Bring their boyfriends or girlfriends home to their parents. Wear whatever they want.”

Babe shook his head. “No, come on, you’re pulling my leg, there’s no way that could all happen. There’s no _way_.”

“It’s not perfect,” Gene conceded. “I’m in a pretty good place, but go a couple parishes over and there’s a town where you don’t hold another man’s hand unless you want to get dragged behind a pickup. But I’m not making this up, Babe. The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015.”

Babe put a hand over his mouth as he stared over the snow-drifted field toward the German lines. “Christ. Jesus H. Christ. What’s the Church say?”

“Eh.” Gene gave an equivocating shrug. “The Pope said it’s not a sin.”

“_What_?”

“The official stance is still that it’s immoral,” Gene cautioned. “But most people disagree, at least in the U.S. That’s why it got legalized.” 

Babe sat back heavily against the side of the foxhole, looking windblown. Gene let him have some space to process.

The woods were pretty quiet, around them. Ahead, he could hear someone singing a sad-sounding song in German, and behind he heard the creaking of trees, the hiss of a Coleman stove, and the low sounds of conversation. There were no animal sounds. No hooting owls, no rustling undergrowth as their prey ran from them. No yipping coyotes, no snuffles and grunts of porcupines or opossums, or whatever animals lived in Europe. The only sounds were men, the sentinel trees, and the distant sounds of war.

Finally, Babe cleared his throat. “Hell of a future,” he said, his eyes skewing toward Gene, then away. “But either way, you know, no one’s sick. Least not that way.”

Gene frowned. “How’s that?”

Babe frowned right back. “Only women’ll give you VD. Everyone knows that, come on.”

The words seemed to echo between Gene’s ears without making any contact, they made that little sense. He stared at Babe. “What?”

Color rose high on Babe’s cheeks. “Yeah, the PSAs are only about women? ‘Flies spread disease, so keep yours closed’? I mean I get it, women are--” his eyes went glazed for a moment, looking at visions Gene could only imagine, before he snapped back. “Yeah, women are great, but you won’t catch anything from men.” He winced. “I mean, aside from a blue ticket home, if you’re stupid.”

Gene had once spent an entire afternoon with Tantes Lisa and Vivienne (honorary aunts, no relation), and they had told him--no more than fifteen years old, but sure in the knowledge of himself--of the years they’d spent helping men die of AIDS with as much dignity as a hateful nation had let them. That afternoon was vivid in his mind, even a decade later.

“Babe,” he said, unable to quite believe he was explaining this to a grown man. “Gay sex isn’t any safer than straight sex.”

Babe scoffed, but it died at whatever he saw on Gene’s face. “You’re serious?”

“As a heart attack,” he replied. _As an epidemic that killed a generation_, he didn’t say. “Any sexual contact is a risk for an STI.”

Babe looked at him uncertainly, like maybe he wished Gene was wrong anyway, but eventually he sighed and turned away. “Fuck.” He rubbed his forehead. “_Fuck_. You must think I’m some kind of two-bit rube. Don’t know shit about shit.”

“Nobody comes out knowing everything,” was all Gene could think to say. 

Babe smiled stiffly. “Guess not.”

Silence fell between them again. Gunshots pattered in the distance. Someone laughed; Gene wondered if Babe knew who it was.

Babe shifted, coming out of his brooding. “So who’s got the crotch rot?”

Gene shrugged. “I didn’t get his name, but he sounded like he was from Philadelphia, too. Said he had gonorrhea.” 

Babe’s sudden shout of laughter echoed across the little valley, and was answered by a volley of machine gun fire from the German side. Gene ducked his head below the level of the foxhole, his heart pounding; Babe crowded down on top of him, making sounds like a wounded donkey.

“You trying to kill us?” Gene demanded.

“Fuck,” was all Babe could seem to say. “Oh my God, oh my sweet fuckin’ baby Jesus…”

“Babe!”

“That’s his name!” Babe finally gasped, his hands tight around Gene as he shielded him with his body. “Guarnere, Gonorrhea, I’m dyin’, Gene, holy shit!”

“I’m glad you think this is funny!” Gene was squeezed into Babe’s lap, the _pap-pap-pap_ of bullets hitting snow directly overhead, and Gene was so cold and scared his balls were crawling up into his lungs, but Babe’s dick was about two inches away from his face like this, and fuck him if he didn’t want to suck it before it got shot off by Nazis. 

That thought lasted all of five seconds, until Babe went rigid above him.

Horrible, curdling visions of Babe’s brains splattering against the side of the foxhole shot through him. “Babe, you alright?” He pressed a hand against his side.

The bullets fell silent overhead.

“Babe?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, Gene.” He sounded so far from fine that the hairs stood up on the back of Gene’s neck.

“You shot?”

“No. They missed me.”

“Something’s wrong.”

Slowly, Babe levered himself back upright. Gene followed, searching his face for any sign of what had gone south, but it was too dark to tell. “Just figured out what the curse is after, this time.”

Gene let his breath out slowly. “Oh.”

Babe let out a humorless huff of breath. “Yeah. Shit.” Another flare burst into flame overhead, and Gene could see the tired, bleak expression that had carved itself deep into the lines of Babe’s face.

“I’ve been in this curse for seventy-four years now, I guess,” he said. “Might as well be eternity. I might as well be dead, Gene, and this might as well be Hell.”

The flare flickered overhead, washing out the forest around them until there was only the punishing glare of light on snow, and them two, huddled in the safety of shadow together. 

Gene laid his hand on Babe’s thigh, gripping tight. “God made me an instrument of His hand,” he said. “And Christ conquered death. So I guess I’m learning necromancy, Babe Heffron, ‘cause you're not dead yet, not if I have anything to say about it.”

Babe looked at him, his lips parted, his eyes so full of longing that Gene’s breath caught. It was just them in the entirety of the world, washed clean in the halo of a magnesium flare.

Then the flare died, plunging the world into darkness. Then, a low thump in the distance. Babe made a choked, terrified noise. Gene turned his head to look, but all he could see were the frozen woods on the German side, still and waiting.

Then, a high, piercing whistle.

Babe lurched around in the foxhole. “Incoming!”

It wasn’t until the first explosion that Gene understood what was going on. The earth shook; his eyes were blinded by the flash of light; clods of dirt and snow rained down on them. He sat in shock as, before his eyes, a tree shattered into a cloud of splinters and pine needles.

“Oh my God,” he whispered, as the wrath of man rained down upon them.

It was unlike anything he had ever seen, or heard, or felt. Each impact shivered in his ribs, and he could barely breathe through the intensity of the shockwaves. He clutched at bare dirt, his heart half-stopping as another tree careened down upon the both of them, just barely missing their foxhole.

“Babe!” he shouted.

“Just hold on!” Babe shouted back, his hand holding his helmet down on his head. He reached out and pulled Gene back into his lap, shielding him from debris and shrapnel. His fingers were so tight against Gene’s shoulder they dug into bone, but Gene barely noticed. He looked up, and he could see the trails across the sky, countless falling stars burning across the sky, screaming like the damned before tearing chunks out of earth itself.

Gene had often wondered what a smiting looked like. If the workers at Babel had seen God’s fury coming, and if it was anything like what Lot’s wife had seen when she looked back. In that moment, Gene knew an almost holy awe. The forest burned; the earth heaved; Babe was yelling above him, Gene could feel his hot breath against his neck, and the vibration of his voice through his back, but Gene couldn’t hear it over the explosions and the groaning creak of trees ripping apart under their own torn weight.

Then it was over. Babe let him up, and Gene raised his head to look.

The forest shivered in the aftermath. Pine needles and dust drifted through the air, and the scent of turned earth and cordite was heavy in Gene’s nose. There had been fallen trees before; there were even more now, their shattered stumps turned into their headstones, their naked, white wood wet and gleaming in the dark. The ground had been uneven before, pockmarked with foxholes and trenches; now, great gashes and craters were torn through the snow. Then Gene noticed the chunks of twisted metal that jutted out of the earth all of a foot away from the edge of their foxhole. He stared at them. Any one could have taken off his arm. Six inches closer and he would have been bleeding out in a muddy hole in the woods.

A voice rose in a broken wail: “Medic!”

Gene jolted. He looked down at the cross on his arm. He didn’t know about wartime trauma, but he could damn well help. He started to climb out of the hole, but Babe caught him by the back of his collar.

“Don’t move!” he snapped, his voice harsh.

Other voices rose, heavy with command: “Stay in your holes! Nobody leave their holes!”

Nearby, someone called out: “Doc, Babe, you all right?”

“We’re fine!” Babe shouted back, his voice tense. “How ‘bout you, Alley?”

“Living the dream!”

Gradually the men in the other foxholes started speaking up, shouting reassurances back and forth to each other, though none left the safety of their holes save a few distant figures, careening in mad dashes through the trees before dropping out of sight. Beside Gene, Babe remained silent, shivering slightly.

In the distance, Gene slowly realized that what he thought was a similar conversation was something worse. Someone was crying for help, short, inarticulate gasps of words, sharpening and gaining volume as they went. The false cheer of the men closer to them fell silent, and they listened with grim knowledge. One of their own was wounded.

Babe was tight as a piano wire. “Just stay in your hole, Bill, just fucking stay _put_, just this once.”

“Babe, what’s--why isn’t anyone helping?”

“Don’t you _fucking_ move,” he spat. “They’re waiting for us to get up and move around.” His eyes were red-rimmed and burning as he stared off into the woods, toward the wailing voice.

Then, another voice raised with the injured man’s, too far away to understand, but raised in encouragement. Babe made a small, broken noise.

Gene kept his eyes fixed on Babe’s face. An unbearable intensity of emotion was contorting it, twisting it into a grimace of near-pain.

It was almost a relief when the wind turned into the whistle of artillery.

Babe screamed when the shells finally landed. Gene nearly leaped out of his skin, certain that he’d been hit, but he hadn’t--he was staring back through the woods, his fingers bloodless on the stock of his rifle, his feet braced so firmly into the side of the foxhole that his boots were buried a half-inch into the frozen loam.

He was screaming words, Gene realized through the haze of his own terror.

“Fuck! Fuck you! Fucking stop it, stop it, stop! Stop making me see it! _Fuck you_!” It went on for as long as the shelling did, though by the end Babe was almost voiceless, the words dissolved into wordless rage and fear. Gene watched him this time, instead of the fireworks around them. It was almost more terrible, witnessing the human impact of the shelling than the shelling itself. He couldn’t look away.

When it was done, Babe didn’t wait for the dust to settle. He was out of his hole like a shot, and Gene scrambled after, nearly face-planting in the snow when his wobbly legs collapsed under him. Babe didn’t miss a beat, just grabbed Gene’s arm and hauled him to his feet, and they were off, running through the warren of foxholes and shell craters, passing dirty, despairing faces on all sides.

“_M-Medic!_”

Gene couldn’t tell one foxhole-littered clearing from another, but Babe didn’t hesitate. He hurdled deadfall and once cleared a foxhole with the men still inside. They shouted something after, but Gene didn’t catch it; he was hard-pressed to keep up, less sure of his footing in the snow and not in as nearly as good a shape as Babe was. 

“Bill!” Babe shouted, skidding to a halt in a bramble of torn trees. Gene folded forward and braced himself on his knees, gasping for breath.

“Getting soft around the middle, there, Doc,” a familiar voice said weakly, and Gene looked up sharply. His breath caught, stabbing like a knife between his ribs.

Blood. So much that it washed the snow red. So much that it stank, hot and metallic, coating the back of Gene’s tongue. Two men lay on the ground before him, shredded below the knees, wounds like Gene had never seen. He recognized one of them. He was the one who’d saved Gene, G-something, who didn’t have gonorrhea.

Babe was already moving, shouldering his rifle and digging through his coat. “Hey, Joe, you alright, buddy? Bill, whaddaya see, whaddaya say?”

“Colder than Satan’s fucking asshole,” Bill said, his face chalk-white, his voice barely above a whisper. “How’s Joe, is Joe good?”

“He’s fine, don’t worry about it,” Babe said, settling down by his head. “You worry about you, ya dumbfuck.”

Joe was already dead. Bled out before they could get to him. 

Gene was no stranger to trauma. He’d seen hands caught in threshers, he’d seen what an alligator could do, he’d helped people through the throes of cottonmouth venom until they could get to the nearest dose of antivenin. But he looked at Bill and Joe’s broken bodies, freezing to the ground with their own blood, and all he could see was Thomasine on Aunt Irene’s bench.

“_Gene_!” He came back to himself with a slow blink. Babe was staring at him, his face haggard and his eyes ablaze. “Gene, the fuck are you waiting for?”

The world snapped into focus, and Gene went down to his knees beside them. He didn’t think the warmth of God would reach him, here. He didn’t hold a place in this memory, and his influence wouldn’t change the outcome, any more than Babe’s had changed the outcome of Gene’s dream. But he couldn’t just stand back and let a man die. He grabbed a shattered piece of wood. 

“Hey, Bill,” he said. “You saved my life, I’ll save yours, huh?”

“You better,” Bill said, his lips a dangerous shade of blue. “Or I’m haunting your ass.”

Gene reached for his medic bag and yanked it open, fumbling out vials of morphine and atropine, and little packets of something called “sulfa,” and tightly-wadded bundles of bandages. Nothing that would--there, scissors. Somewhere to start. He snatched them up and started cutting away Bill’s pantleg. He was about to ask for Babe’s scarf when he saw it on the ground, among the scattered bandages: a little white box labeled “Tourniquet: Field.” He tore it open and pulled out a long strip of cotton webbing, with an alligator buckle on the end. Better than a hole in the head. Gene cinched it tight above Bill’s knee, which was almost reduced to a pulp from the force of the shrapnel that had gone through it. Gene carefully didn’t think about it, didn’t let himself properly see it. 

Other people started coming into the clearing: one with a narrow, pointy face and soft eyes, another with a radio strapped to his back. “Shit,” the first said. “Luz, radio for an ambulance!”

The tourniquet didn’t do anything. Gene twisted the branch until the webbing cut deep into Bill’s thigh, but the bleeding didn’t stop. Panic licked at the edges of Gene’s mind. He grabbed a bandage and ripped it out of its packaging.

“Hold on, Bill,” he said, as calmly as he could. “Still gotta get you that penicillin.”

“C-cold,” Bill said, his eyes fluttering.

“Come on, Bill, don’t fall asleep on us now,” Babe said, gently patting Bill’s cheeks. “Gonna make us all look bad, don’t want us looking like regular infantry, now, do you?”

There was so much blood. Gene’s hands slipped in it as he tried to fasten the bandage down. He pressed as hard as he dared, pulling the ties tight, and fumbled for another bandage. He left bloody handprints all over his bag, but he barely noticed. The first bandage was soaked through with red in the scant seconds he had looked away. 

He did what he could, but Bill died in Babe’s arms, bleeding out into the snow.

Babe was quiet about it, the way he hadn’t been when the shells were dropping. His hands fluttered over Bill’s slack cheeks, smoothing down his scraggly beard. Tears slid down Babe’s cheeks unnoticed. He pressed a single kiss to Bill’s forehead, then gently laid him to rest against the snow. The others, Luz and--Malarkey? had been shouting for a medic, but at this, they fell silent. Gene sat back and tried to catch his breath.

Babe stood and walked over to Gene. “I’m so Goddamn tired,” he said, then kept walking. Gene gave one last glance to Bill, who lay still and white-faced in a halo of red, before he rose to follow Babe. Wakefulness was dawning on the horizon, but the curse still held him, and this was Babe’s show. Babe walked back to their foxhole, and stood on the edge of the snow-covered meadow that separated them from the German lines.

“The number of times I’ve walked out there,” he said. “They never shoot.”

Every fiber of Gene’s body drew up tight in denial.

“I’ve tried--I don’t know how many times to kill myself, but it doesn’t work. The gun jams, or the rope frays, or I can suddenly breathe underwater.” He took a deep, shaking breath. “I don’t really wanna die, is the thing, but Christ, I can’t see any other way of getting out of here.”

He stopped and scoffed at himself. “No, gotta be honest, right? Maybe I _do_ want to die. How’s that for a sin?”

Gene laid a bloody hand on Babe’s arm.

“You know what I thought, when I saw Bill? The first time, I mean.” He looked at Gene. Gene shook his head. “I thought--I thought ‘thank God it’s him and not me.’ I thought that, about my _friend_. I was _relieved_.” Babe’s face was riven, his whole body shaking. He sucked in a spasmodic breath, and suddenly he calmed. “I deserve this. It’s God’s punishment.”

Where the words came from, Gene would never know. He squeezed Babe’s arm until his joints ached, and he said, “Then I’m God’s forgiveness.”

Babe turned to look at him, his eyes red-rimmed and glassy, as though with fever. Agonies of the soul.

Gene licked his lips. “I may not be much of a traiteur,” he said. “But I’m gonna get you out of here, Babe. And if I can’t, my family will.”

Babe just looked at him, and Gene looked back. They stared at each other, standing by a foxhole on the edge of no man’s land, and Gene didn’t know what was on his face, but he couldn’t look away from Babe’s. The intensity of his expression, the sweep of his brow, the wide curve of his mouth. Gene reckoned he was probably falling in love. “I’ll get you out of here,” he said again. If he said it one more time, it would be binding.

The dream began to dissolve around him, and for the first time, Gene didn’t want to wake up. “Babe,” he said, reaching out to touch Babe’s cheek, but his body lay heavy in his bed, and the weight of reality dragged him back to wakefulness. He opened his eyes. The messy tumble of his desk next to the bed was all he saw, not Babe’s cold-chapped face.

“God,” he said, and he didn’t know if it was a curse or a prayer.


	4. Chapter 4

He was woken up again by something buzzing by his ear. His phone. The habitual adrenaline surge of panic woke him up enough to fumble it off, but then he flopped back into bed, groaning. His head was pounding like an Ash Wednesday hangover. Thank God he’d set his alarm; it was his Hail Mary alarm, for those rare days he didn’t wake up on his own. He allowed himself three steadying breaths then forced himself upright.

Christ. He felt like he hadn’t slept in a week. Exhaustion pulled at his limbs, rounding his shoulders and pulling at his eyelids. He’d have to snag one of the energy drinks his coworkers kept in the fridge in the breakroom; if he didn’t properly wake up, he wouldn’t be safe to operate heavy machinery, let alone an arc welder.

He slapped his cheeks, not really expecting it to do much, but he told himself it did, and that was all he needed to get moving.

Shit, shower, shave. Re-tie the cordon around his elbow; his wrist didn’t look worse, he didn’t think, but it didn’t look better, either. Dress, stuff some Cheerios down the hatch. He stared at the coffee press with a sharp envie, but he’d miss the bus if he took any more time. He frowned at the kitchen for a moment, trying to figure what was out of place, before he realized Piggy wasn’t twining around his ankles in hopes of more food.

He breathed through the hurt. Told himself it didn’t hurt. 

He stopped by the coffee table on the way to the front door and fought the odd urge to tell the puzzle goodbye. To tell _Babe_ goodbye. “See you,” he mumbled, before letting himself out.

He was so tired. He felt like the day after a track meet on a shitty night’s sleep. He slipped on the apartment stairs, and just barely caught himself before he took a header into the landing wall. He crossed himself like his grandmother always did, like he and his siblings always did: half in mockery and half in earnestness. _Thank God for looking out for you, cher, and pray He gave you a hard head, too_. At least the adrenaline rush kicked him in the ass. It was just enough to get him to the bus before it pulled away.

It was warm on the bus, from the heaters and the press of commuters. Gene let an abuelita take the last seat; he didn’t trust himself not to miss his stop, if he sat. If he fell asleep on his feet, then at least the fall would wake him up.

Maybe he should have called in. He chewed on his lip, weighing the pros and cons. He pulled out his phone and brought up his boss’s cell, his thumb hovering over the “call” icon. A tiny eternity of indecision ate him, before he switched it off and put it back in his pocket. He was almost there, anyway. He could try one of the energy drinks, and if they didn’t do the job, then neither would he. He had plenty of PTO saved up; the boss would have to let him go, even this close to Christmas, or the Union would chew him up like yesterday’s Juicy Fruit.

“Whoa, Gene,” Frankie said when he finally hauled his sorry ass up the loading dock stairs. “You okay, man?”

Gene considered all the possible answers he could give to that, and settled on “Been better.”

“No shit, man, you look like death. No way Ulibarri’s letting you work today.”

“Gonna see a fridge about a Monster, first.”

“I don’t think Monster has the kind of amphetamines your ass needs,” Frankie said with a snort. “I’m staying away from the workshop today, bro, no hard feelings.”

“You don’t want to die ugly in a fire?”

“Are you kidding? The Union would make my fucking _ghost_ sit through so many safety briefings. They’d resurrect _your_ ghost just to kill it again, is that what you want?”

“Why not,” Gene said, pushing through into the main building. “Change it up some.”

The familiar smells of scorched metal, lubricant, and industrial grade coolant did more than a little to wake him up, the muscle memory of work a shot to his brain. Not enough, though; he raided the fridge, cracked open one of Marco’s cans of coffee-flavored goblin piss and choked down at least a third, and he _still_ fumbled his welding helmet right when Ulibarri walked by.

“Seriously, Gene?” he asked wearily.

Gene sighed. “What else am I gonna do all day?”

“_Rest_,” Ulibarri said. “If it’s the ‘flu I don’t want you spreading it around, and if it’s something else, fuck, go to a hospital or something. You know I can’t let you work when you look like that.”

Gene sighed again, even deeper. “Yeah. Okay.”

“You need tomorrow off, too?”

Gene thought about it. He’d never done a healing like this, before; at the rate he was going, he’d be, hah, dead by the time Sunday rolled around. “The rest of the week,” he said apologetically. “Probably next week, too.”

Ulibarri gave him a long, searching look. “Fine,” he said, like he could have said no. “But you’re on call for Christmas Day.”

Gene didn’t even work house calls, he was the only welder they had and they wanted desperately to keep him happy, but everyone wanted Christmas off, and Ulibarri had to be sweating bullets. Gene was still the lowest man on the totem pole, welder or not. He shrugged. Epiphany was the bigger holiday. Not that he celebrated that, either; likely he’d just get a fifth of something cheap and feel sorry for himself in the dark. “Alright.”

Five minutes later, he was outside, blinking away exhausted tears from the pounding midwinter sunlight, and trying to figure out how to fill an entire day. He thought for a while, his hands in his pockets, before he turned toward the bus stop. There was something he wanted to check at the library. 

***

The street was sleepy and slow, Seventies-dated, with vinyl carports and bars on the windows. Not the poorest, but far from the richest. Most of the cars Gene could see were Aughts models or earlier. He looked down at his phone, then up at the address numbers on the worn brick of the house in front of him. 6533 Tremont Lane. This was the place.

He mustered his courage and went up to the door. A small potted plant sat beneath the window next to it, long withered and dead; weeds were running wild on the lawn. He rang the doorbell.

There was no answer. Gene waited, feeling like an idiot. A dog barked in the distance. He rang the doorbell again, in case the owner thought it was a mistake, or a prank. He heard it ring somewhere in the depths of the house.

A middle-aged woman answered the door, her brown hair streaked with gray, wrapped in a cardigan and a suspicious expression. “Yes?”

“I, uh--” Gene looked down at his phone, re-checking his notes. “Does Marjorie Ludwig live here?”

The woman’s expression didn’t change. “We already know who we’re going to vote for.”

“No, I--I’m not canvassing. I’m… Um.” Four hours spent buried in the city’s public records and a bus ride later, and Gene still hadn’t figured out a way to broach the subject. “My name’s Eugene Roe, ma’am. I have some questions for Ms. Ludwig about the night her fiancé died.”

The woman stared at him for a moment, assessing. She was definitely a relative; her eyes had a similar quality to the woman’s in the dream. “Are you a reporter?”

“Uh… no.”

“A cop?”

“No. Look, I know it’s personal--”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Roe, but my grandmother doesn’t like to think about those days. Go bother someone else.” She started to close the door.

“Wait!” Gene put his hand on the door before she could close it. “Do you know the name Edward Heffron?”

If anything, the woman’s face grew harder. “I think you need to leave, now.”

“No--listen, I found the puzzle--”

“If you don’t leave, I’m calling the police.”

Gene backed away from the door. “Okay, I--” Words failed him. “I’m sorry.”

The woman slammed the door in answer. Gene stared at it in shock for a handful of heartbeats, replaying the conversation--brief as it had been--over in his mind. He ran a hand through his hair and tried to think.

The curtains in the window twitched. Visions of the police throwing him in a cell overnight, and what that would do to him and Babe, got him in gear. He retreated back down the walk, past the grimy porch columns and the weed-filled front yard, and suddenly he was more tired than he had breath in his body. He didn’t know why it was so important that he meet the curse-caster. Three days, and he hadn’t cared; but he’d spent the better part of his day tracking her down, and suddenly he cared very much.

And here he’d gone and fucked it up. “Fuck,” he breathed, and without any particular thought in his head other than how much he wanted to go to sleep, he sat down on the curb in front of Marjorie Crake’s house and put his head in his hands. Christ, his head ached. He dug his thumbs into his eye sockets, but it didn’t do much to help.

He really didn’t want to go home, yet. But he had nowhere else to go.

The sound of the door opening behind him jolted him out of his thoughts. He lurched to his feet, hands up, but it wasn’t Marjorie Crake’s granddaughter, it was a creaking, white-haired figure who could only be Marjorie Crake herself. She was wearing a threadbare housecoat and fraying slippers, her hair draped over her shoulder in a loose braid, and she marched down the driveway toward him like an oncoming storm.

“Were you the young man asking about Edward Heffron?” she asked, her voice strong despite her withered frame.

“Yes, ma’am.” Up close, Gene could see the hard lines creased into her face, the smoker’s wrinkles about her lips, the hammer-blow of her gaze. This was no soft granny; she was unquestionably the woman from his dream.

“You’re here about the curse,” she said, and a knot of tension Gene hadn’t known was there unclenched in his chest.

“Yes, ma’am, I am.”

Her face pinched. “You’d better come inside.”

He followed her up the walk, past the disapproving glower of her granddaughter, and into a drab, cigarette-scented living room. The carpet was brownish, the couch sagging, the TV a squat, cathode ray box rather than a flatscreen.

“Rachel, make us some coffee, would you?”

The granddaughter--Rachel--pursed her lips, but did as she was bid. Marjorie ushered Gene to the couch, then took the recliner closest to the TV for herself. “So,” she said. “You opened the puzzle.”

Gene shifted his weight. There was a spring digging into his ass. “Three days ago, yes.”

“I suppose you expect me to be sorry about it.”

The thought had occurred, but now that he’d met her in person, Gene had his doubts. “No, I can’t say I do. You’ll pardon me, Mrs. Ludwig, but you’ve aged very well.”

“A reason to live will do that to a person,” she said dryly. “Even if it’s a mean old hag’s reason.”

“Wait.” Gene blinked in surprise. “You’re still connected to it?”

Marjorie Crake narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re no witch, that leaves a taste to it. A cunning man?”

“More or less.”

“‘More or less,’” Marjorie repeated. “There’s a lot of leeway in that, Mr. Roe.”

“I was raised up in the folkways, but I’ve been off the path for a while.”

Marjorie Crake smiled a humorless smile. “You can’t walk away from power like that, young man. It follows you.”

“Like a bad penny,” Gene agreed. “So you’re still connected to the curse?”

Marjorie waved a hand. “I couldn’t tell you the particulars. Nothing like you are now, I’d imagine, but it’s enough to know when he’s feeling particularly awful.” There was a cruel twist to her mouth at that, a vicious gleam in her eye. Gene’s hackles rose. He breathed slowly, in and out.

“He killed your fiancé, right?”

“He did.” Her expression gave nothing away.

“That must have been hard.”

Her brows rose, deeply unimpressed.

Gene gritted his teeth and tried again. “That kind of conjuring, it could only come from the deepest hurt. I just want to understand.”

“Are you taking my side?”

“I’m just saying I want to understand.”

She scoffed. “All you types ever want is to understand. You’re all so kind, that way. Doesn’t stop you from trying to let the bastard loose.”

Anger bubbled up in Gene’s chest. “You don’t think--”

Rachel came back, then, interrupting him, two battered mugs of coffee in her hands. Gene took his with a nod of thanks. She retreated to the kitchen and leaned against the bartop, her arms crossed over her chest.

Marjorie eyed him knowingly. “You were saying?”

Rather than respond, Gene sipped his coffee. He fought back a grimace. It was hot, and that was about all it had going for it. “Respectfully, Mrs. Ludwig, but I think you’ll find that imminent death is a powerful motivator.”

She sat on her recliner like an ancient queen, terrible and forbidding, completely belying the chintz and Seventies décor. “Is that so?”

“Most would say so.”

She took a long, slow breath through her teeth, then let it out. “Why are you here, Mr. Roe?”

“That’s a damn good question, ma’am. Pardon my language.”

“I’m not a fainting flower, to be set on my ass by language from boys young enough to be my great-grandchildren,” she replied acerbically. “You came here for a reason, so spit it out, or this conversation is going nowhere.”

“Yeah, alright,” Gene said. “Why’d you do it?”

Her eyes were bright and dangerous. “He killed my fiancé. You said it yourself.”

“That’s not good enough,” Gene snapped. “There’s no crime worth seventy years of torture.”

“I was pregnant with George’s baby when he died,” Marjorie said, her voice gone deceptively soft. “Do you know what it means to be an unwed mother in the Forties, Mr. Roe?”

Taken aback, Gene shook his head.

“It means whispers. It means jokes and strange men propositioning you because they heard you’re easy. It means no one will hire you because you’re careless and slutty, and no one wants that kind of woman working for them. Teaching their children. Cleaning their houses.” Her eyes were as hard as flint. “It means depending on your friends’ goodwill, and finding they’re not your friends. It means crawling back to your parents and enduring your mother’s disgust and your father’s disapproval. It means crying into your pillow for a year straight, Mr. Roe, hoping you don’t wake the baby.”

Gene forced himself to keep her gaze, even though it felt like his skin was peeling off. He knew a boil that needed lancing when he saw one. “And then?”

Marjorie Crake stiffened. “What?”

“So you suffered. For a year, three, ten. However long. And then?”

“Do you really want my life story, boy?”

“I want to understand,” Gene said again. “You sentenced a man to hell, and maybe it was for a good reason. Your ten years of hurt and humiliation aren’t worth his seventy. Aren’t you tired of being that mad?”

Marjorie Crake sucked in a sharp breath.

Rachel spoke for the first time. “Gramma, I can--”

“Rachel, you hush for a little while longer. Me and Mr. Roe still have business to discuss.” Her eyes bored into Gene’s, and it was exactly like being back in the dream. “I don’t regret doing what I had to do,” she finally said. “But I regret the people who have died, and I regret making it so strong.” She finally reached a shaking hand for the mug of coffee, and the illusion of a witch queen was banished. She was an old woman once more, with foibles like everyone else.

She sighed. “I made that curse when I was twenty-six and grieving, and it felt _good_. It made me feel powerful for the first time since George died.” She ran her thumb around the rim of the mug. “My mother always told me actions have consequences.” Her expression went sour. “She used it like a weapon. ‘Actions have consequences, Margie.’ My corpse will hear those words.”

Gene looked down at his own mug. “My grandma always says that curses have fine print.”

“Your grandma break many curses?”

“Two that I know of. Nothing this strong.”

Marjorie eyed him for a while, then looked past him, to the framed photos hung on the wall. Her eyes moved over them one by one. “Fed by your anger is a hard way to live,” she said contemplatively. “Ask my children, I’m sure they can tell you.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Ludwig. And that you had to suffer for it.”

She pursed her lips as she looked at him, and the sudden resemblance between her and her granddaughter was uncanny. “You really mean that, don’t you.”

Gene nodded.

She was quiet for a very long time, and the ticking of the clock on the wall was deafening. She looked at a small, black-and-white photograph beside her chair, too small for Gene to make out. “Have you ever done something terrible, Mr. Roe?”

It hit like a blow to the chest. Gene swallowed heavily. He didn’t have to say anything, he could have lied, but a wild urge possessed him, and it felt _right_. “Yes,” he half-whispered.

“What did you do?”

“I--” His voice gave out. Marjorie Crake wasn’t his confessor, but it didn’t matter; Gene cleared his throat and said the words he’d kept to himself for over three years. “I killed my cousin.”

“Hah,” Marjorie said bitterly. “That’s why you want to help him. You’re looking for absolution.”

There was nothing Gene could say to that. He stared down into his coffee and tried not to throw up on the ugly brown carpet.

“What a pair we are,” Marjorie said. “Two sinners, just trying to make a way forward.” There was a strange sort of contentment about her, and it occurred to Gene that she’d been alone as Babe had, for seventy years. Everyone around her either afraid or disbelieving. What must it feel like, to finally meet a--Gene’s stomach churned. To meet someone who _understood_?

“Seventy years is probably long enough,” she finally said. “And I’m tired of people dying.”

Gene let out a long breath. He felt again the spider’s web over his shoulders, like he had the first night; it shivered now, before settling back into his skin. “Thank you, ma’am.”

She waved it away. “Is there anything you need? If it’s money I’m afraid I don’t have much to spare.”

“No, I don’t take money. What I do, it’s a… gift. From God.”

“You look like it’s a turd in a bathtub, not a gift.”

Gene made a face at that analogy, but didn’t say anything. His doubts and crises of faith were his business.

“I’ll ask one last time, and if you don’t answer, then I’ll consider my debt paid. What can I give that you need?”

“Your prayers, if you’re one to give them,” Gene finally said. “That’s all I need.”

“Done,” she said, looking once more like a ruler granting boons to the lowly. “I wish you all the success, Mr. Roe.”

“Thank you,” he said, setting down the coffee. “The same to you.”

He nodded to Rachel as she let him out, and he sighed in relief when the door closed behind him. He shrugged out his shoulders. Time to go home.

***

Renée still wasn't back by the time Gene hung his keys on the hook by the door, even though it was past five and she usually got home around 4:30 on Thursdays. He rubbed his eyes and tried to look at things her way.

Her roommate had had a seeming break from reality, and--and Renée didn’t have the best history with men, so the fact that her roommate was male didn’t help. Honestly, there were days Gene couldn’t fathom how she’d trusted him as much as she had. She’d taken her cat, which meant she planned to stay away for multiple days--though Gene was more than willing to feed and clean after Piggy, so it was more that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to come back.

“Fuck,” he said quietly to himself. “I’m sorry, please, I’m sorry.”

He didn’t know what to do. There was a cursed man in pieces on his coffee table, he’d scared away his roommate, and he was literally dying. His breath caught. Fuck, he was _dying_. He stared at the puzzle, and he thought of Marjorie Crake tending a curse in a cradle.

He hadn’t been this bad since he’d first gotten to Pennsylvania, when the urge to run had ran out on him and left him stranded and aimless. At least then he hadn’t been tied to a curse that was eating him alive. 

Gene’s hand twisted around the rosary in his pocket. Wouldn’t his mother be proud to see what he’d made of himself? A healer who didn’t heal, a Roe without a family. Thank God the cancer had taken her when it had, so she wouldn’t have had to see Gene like this.

All of a sudden the apartment was too quiet, too empty. A burst of energy shot through him, an ill-feeling, restless anxiety, and without really thinking it through, he started combing through the pantry and refrigerator. Chicken breasts in the freezer, celery and onion going limp on the counter; flour left over from Renée’s ill-fated attempt at baking. Good butter in the fridge, because neither of them could tolerate anything less than the best; bay leaves, pepper, cayenne. There was no way he’d get filé powder up here in Philly, and okra wasn’t in season, so a dark roux it was, and maybe some cornstarch.

A few minutes across the street at the corner grocery got him the piment and a shitty northern sausage, as well as some shrimp that looked decently fresh.

His mama had taught him how to cook, back when he was small. Just chopping, first, then sautéing greens, and as he got better, she’d showed him how to make a roux. After that, his grandmother had laughed, he’d mastered the art of Cajun cooking.

The puzzle was a weight at his back. He put on the Glenn Miller Pandora station he’d made as a gag to drown out the ringing silence of the apartment, but it couldn’t cover Marjorie’s words. They echoed in Gene’s ears: _Have you ever done something terrible, Mr. Roe?_ He honed Renée’s chef knife and started dicing the onion.

Such tiny events were the hinges lives swung on. If Marjorie and George hadn’t walked down that street, if Babe hadn’t whistled, if George had had better footing or Babe a better shot, then Gene wouldn’t be here. Then again, if Gene hadn’t gotten shitfaced on Moody LeDoux’s bathtub moonshine then maybe he wouldn’t be here either, trying to make gumbo in South Philly. Trying to remember what being a good man looked like. 

Four hours later, he had a clean kitchen, a pot of gumbo that would take him a lifetime to finish, and an ache for the bayou lodged in his chest like angina. Renée still hadn’t come home. 

The gumbo wasn’t too bad. He’d almost burned the roux--he could taste the faintest hint of char--but it was still edible, northern sausage aside. It really was despicable, something German or Polish, nothing compared to a good andouille or boudin. Gene would drink pondwater before he brought it to the family, but for a last-minute, northern make-do, it was alright.

He sat in the kitchen chair, his empty bowl cooling in front of him, and ran his fingers over his mother’s rosary.

Three days down, four to go. He turned in his chair, peering over his shoulder into the darkened living room, but the puzzle was nothing more than a dark smear on the coffee table, waiting. Gene wondered if it was Babe or the curse he was feeling, when he got the frissons like this. He reckoned probably the curse. Babe had never made him feel cold dread. Well, not deliberately.

Gene finally pushed himself up and went into the living room, switching on the lamp. He wanted to fucking _sleep_, but if he did, then he absolutely would die. The only way out was through, and his life wasn’t worth much, these days, but Babe deserved better than Gene’s apathy.

He wrapped the rosary around his wrist. He lit the candle. He fell into the trance.

What pulled him out, he couldn’t have said; merely that a sense of completion came to him, and he lifted his head from his work. As he did, his eyes turned to the skeleton like a compass needle finding true north. It had lungs, now. Babe, Babe had lungs. Pillowing around his beating heart, inflating with the downward clench of his newly-grown diaphragm. Muscle was roped over his bones--not all of the muscle that covered a human body, but the deep tissue and fascia.

Babe took a slow step forward. If he was aware what he looked like, he made no indication of it; he stepped toward Gene, and Gene was still full in the trance when he stood and walked around the coffee table to meet him. A distant, screaming part of his mind wondered how Babe could see without eyes, but Gene paid that part no mind. He reached his hand up to touch Babe’s face--

He felt warm skin and stubble. His eyes told him his hand touched bare bone and sinew, but it was Babe’s wholly human cheek he felt against his palm. The revenant vision before him turned into his touch, and like that, the warmth of God fled Gene’s body.

The world tilted crazily. Gene braced for the impact of his knees on the floor, but it didn’t come; his arm hurt instead. He blinked tears of exhaustion out of his eyes, trying to understand why the living room was at such a weird, low-angled tilt--before the dots connected, and he realized Babe had grabbed him before he could fall on his face. Babe’s concern was palpable, as was his regret as he slowly lowered Gene down the rest of the way. Gene sprawled on his back and stared up at him.

He looked even more unearthly from this angle. His heart fluttered between his ribs like a caged bird, and his lungs didn’t fully inflate--Gene hadn’t realized that shallow breathing was literal. He looked up at Babe’s--skull, face, whatever, and where any normal person would probably have run screaming for their life, Gene just felt the most peaceful and accepted he’d felt in, oh, three years, probably. They stood like that until Babe disappeared, a gradual fading out of reality, and then it was just Gene, leaking tears like a dumbfuck on the nasty apartment carpet. 

He lay there for a while, until he made himself say the words out loud, to the silent emptiness of the apartment:

“I don’t wanna die.” He shuddered. “Oh, God, I don’t wanna die.”

The apartment didn’t answer back. Gene was alone. Briefly, he considered just laying there, but shame forced him up to his hands and knees. It couldn’t force him higher. His arms trembled under his weight, and shame or no, he was a traiteur who was taking a fucking beating. He crawled to his bed. 

One more shitty day down.

***

His mouth tasted of tobacco. Gene exhaled on habit, blowing out the smoke, and there it was: the dizzy, tingling feeling of nicotine that made it all worthwhile, and nevermind the ashtray taste. Christ. It’d been at least a year since his last cigarette. He leaned back against the warm wall behind him, relaxing into the high. Gum just wasn’t the same.

He opened his eyes. And then sighed. His turn to dream, again. He took another pull off the cigarette and gazed over the lines of traffic outside the New Orleans Greyhound terminal. He hadn’t spent long here, and overall, the memory wasn’t bad. God only knew what the curse would drag up. 

“Hey, Gene.” Babe’s familiar voice came from beside him. He turned; Babe was there, sitting next to him on the bench and dressed like some kind of hipster’s vision of a Fifties greaser, in a white t-shirt and dark jeans rolled up at the cuffs. He looked good.

Gene held out the pack.

“Don’t mind if I do.” Babe took one out and Gene lit it for him, staring at the purse of Babe’s lips around the cigarette butt. Babe pulled the smoke in greedily, and he huffed it out with a low moan, his eyes fluttering back. Gene looked away, flicking the ash off the end of his own cigarette to keep his mind off the tightening in his groin.

They didn’t say anything else for a while, just sat in a companionable silence beneath the lazy Louisiana sun. “You know,” Gene said, turning his cigarette this way and that, inspecting it. “They figured out these’ll kill you.”

“What, cigarettes?” Babe laughed a disbelieving laugh, but it trailed off when Gene didn’t join in. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah.” Gene took another puff. “The longer you smoke, the sicker you get.”

Babe looked down at his cigarette like it had betrayed him. “But… they put them in our rations. Docs prescribe ‘em all the time, Mickey Dobson takes ‘em for his asthma.”

“Jesus, really?” Gene’s face contorted in disgust. “Cigarettes are probably the single worst thing you could do to someone with asthma.”

Babe slumped a little further down on the bench. “You know, Gene, I don’t know if I like the sound of the future, too much.”

Gene patted him on the knee. God forbid when he heard about the rise in fascism.

They smoked the rest of their cigarettes, Babe in sullen silence. Gene checked the time: 10:06. They had time for another smoke before the bus was scheduled to head out. He offered the pack again, and Babe immediately took another one, a stubborn, willful expression on his face that made Gene smile. He lit them both up.

“So, uh,” Babe said after a few puffs, his voice full of forced casualness. “The future.”

He faltered, so Gene said, “Yeah?”

“Lotta things have changed, I guess.”

Gene nodded. “They have.”

Babe fiddled with his cigarette. “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but. Your aunt, she, uh.”

Gene ran his tongue over his lower lip and braced himself.

“Well, she’s… I mean her kids are…” Babe winced. “Did she marry a, I don’t know how you call it in the future, a Negro?”

Gene let out a slow breath. “Yeah, she did. That’s legal now, too. And the term is Black or African-American.”

There had been a small uproar in certain parts of the family, when Irene had married a black man. Gene’s corner didn't much care, as far as he’d ever heard; but there was always that one cousin--he wasn't naming names. They hadn't been keen when Gene brought his first boyfriend home, either. Fear of God and Evangeline Verret had kept their protests to a low grumbling, and Gene figured that was all their opinions were worth.

“Huh.” Babe took a deep, no doubt restorative pull on his cigarette. “Go fuckin’ figure.”

That wasn’t the promising reaction Gene was hoping for, not that he’d had high hopes. “Don’t know if you’ll stick around to meet Nonc Eduard, but just so we’re crystal: you show any kind of prejudice against him or my cousins, I’ll take you out back and drown you in Long Pond and let the leeches suck you dry.” The odds of Aunt Irene ever letting Gene near her or her family again were slim to fucking none, but the point stood.

Babe looked at him like he’d lost his head. “Jesus, Gene, you don’t gotta tell me to be a human.”

“Some things about the future haven’t changed,” was all Gene said. “Gotta make sure.”

There was another, even longer pause than before. Gene kept his eye on the clock, but they still had time.

“They still have them segregated?” Babe asked. “C--Blacks. African-Americans. The Army was segregated, said they weren’t as good at being soldiers.”

Gene flicked his cigarette butt into the nearby trash can. “No. Segregation, Jim Crow, all that was abolished in the Sixties. Officially, anyway. We had a black president a couple years ago.”

“No _fuckin’_ shit?” Babe’s smile was a goddamn relief. “_President_. How about that. There been a Catholic president, yet?”

“Uh… yeah. One back in the Sixties. No woman president yet, though.”

Babe looked completely nonplussed. “What do you mean, a woman president?” He scoffed. “A woman can't be president, come on.”

Gene stared at him, dumbstruck.

“What’re you looking at me like that for?” Babe leaned away a little. “You’re giving me that look like you did last night. Is this a future thing?”

Gene shook his head, making a mental note to… the thought petered out. No point showing appreciation to a roommate who wasn’t there. Or send a card to a grandmother he was estranged from. He sighed and slouched against the cinderblock wall. “Yeah. It’s a future thing. Women aren’t any less capable than men.”

“Look, okay, it’s been seventy fucking years, and apparently every-fucking-thing has changed, you can’t expect me to just _know_\--”

“No, you’re right,” Gene said. “I’m not mad. I just forget.”

Babe looked at him for a bit, then tapped the ash off his cigarette. “Must be nice.”

Gene looked up at him questioningly. Babe shrugged. “I can’t ever forget, you know? Don’t know nobody, everything looks different--” he waved his hand at the traffic passing them by. “Never seen so many cars in my life, and I grew up in a city. People dress different, the air smells different, I--” he sighed. “I can’t forget at all.”

There was fuckall Gene could say to that.

Babe smoked his cigarette down to the filter and flicked it out into the street. He sighed. “So no woman president?”

“No. We nearly did, but…” Gene grimaced. “Modern politics is a whole other discussion.”

Babe’s eyes moved over Gene’s face, and his expression closed in a little. “That bad, huh.”

“Worse.”

Babe spit in reply. “You’re really overselling 2020, here, Gene. No jetpacks, cigarettes’ll kill you, and the politics are so bad you don’t even want to talk about it.”

Gene shrugged. “You got cursed into a puzzle, I got cursed with birth in the year of our Lord 1995.”

Babe’s expression was wary, almost shocked at Gene’s blasé nihilism, but the the overhead intercom crackled before he could say anything. “_Attention all passengers: the 10:30 bus for Mobile, Alabama departs in ten minutes._”

“That’s me,” Gene said, standing. “Or… us, I guess.” He didn’t want to ask Babe to come with him, even though he wanted it with every fiber in his body. This bus ride had been the first time he’d left Louisiana, and it hadn’t been half as bad as getting shelled in the middle of Europe, but it had still been painfully lonely.

“Huh, would you look at that,” Babe said, pulling a bus ticket out of his back pocket. “‘Us,’ it is.” 

Gene’s head shot up, and Babe was smiling at him. “Not ditching you now, ya dumbass. You’ve come this far for me, least I can do is return the favor.”

Well. Gene stared intently at the concrete between their feet, because he didn’t quite know what to say. “Alright, then,” he said around the quiet warmth in his chest. “Let’s. Let’s go, then.”

He bent to pick up his bag--he’d almost forgotten he’d brought one, his memories of that day weren’t very clear--and they headed around the side of the station, toward the terminal. Gene gave Babe a shy glance. “You’re Irish, right? Catholic?”

“Did the hair give it away?” Babe asked wryly.

Gene half-smiled. “Northern, red-haired, keep asking about the Church…”

“Ah, shut up.” Babe seemed content to walk beside him, his hands tucked into his tighter-cut, modern pockets. “You ain’t any better, French-speaking mama’s boy who quotes the Pope.”

“Vraiment,” Gene replied. Lord, it had been so long since he’d flirted with someone. “My mama raised me right. I could pray the whole rosary before I could talk.”

Babe pulled up short, clutching at his chest. Gene looked back puzzled, until Babe pulled a jet and silver rosary out from under his shirt. “Fuck, I thought I’d lost it. Ain’t never gotten far enough in the dreams for the curse to put me in modern clothes, before.” He eyed Gene darkly. “I’m blaming these pants on you.”

Gene had to reboot his mind for a moment, arrested by the image of the holy rosary pressed against the naked skin of Babe’s chest. “Priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs,” he said thinly.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Babe shrugged. “Whatever you say. My ma gave this to me after I enlisted,” he said, running his thumb over the crucifix. “Gave me a scapular, too, but I stopped wearing that after I got back.” He looked up at Gene. “I just realized I--I won’t see her again.” He looked so lost.

Gene reached out and gently took the crucifix from Babe’s hand and held it up. “You will.”

Babe looked between it and Gene, his expression strained. He looked away. “Everyone I know, Gene.”

It was on the tip of Gene’s tongue to say _You’ve got me_, but he knew that wasn’t enough. The first question anyone asked back home was “How’s your mama an’ them?” How’s your family? Who’s your kin? A person wasn’t anybody without their family to define them, however which way they chose to define family.

“Between the Goddamn war and this Goddamn curse, I don’t got nobody _left_.” Babe’s knuckles were white around the rosary chain.

“You got a sister,” Gene said. “Anna. I don’t know how she’s doing, but she’s alive.”

Babe ducked his head, and Gene couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders were trembling. “She snorted an egg cream all over me once, when we were kids.”

Gene wrinkled his nose. “Do I want to know what that is?”

“Hell, I--I don’t know, Gene. What do kids drink nowadays when they go to the soda fountain?”

“No soda fountains anymore,” Gene said reluctantly. “But they hit up Paizano’s in my town. Or McDonald’s.”

Babe rubbed his eyes, and Gene wanted so badly to hug him, but he didn’t know how Babe would take it. He reached out a cautious hand and laid it on Babe’s arm. Babe didn’t shrug it off.

“You know, I saw some shit in the war. Shit I don’t--I don’t know I’ll ever be able to talk about.” Babe raised his head, and his eyes were red. “A lot of guys started out devout, God-fearing men, but by the end they, they were cursing God and they meant it. I never got it, because God was probably the first and second reason I got out of there with my sanity, Him and the rest of my company.” He stared fixedly at Gene’s shoulder. “But you know, this curse, I--I’ve got some questions for God. I’m so mad, I can’t--_why_?”

Gene dropped his bag and reached out to hug Babe. The usual run of “What if people see?” clanged through his head, but he shoved all that aside; this was all a dream anyway, save for Babe, and Babe was hurting.

Babe clung to him, burying his face in Gene’s shoulder. “What’m I gonna do when I get out, Gene?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” He was sorry, too, that he was thinking more about how good Babe smelled, or the heat of his body against Gene’s. Catholic guilt was just about his third language, and Mother Mary, he was speaking it now. He ran a hand up and down Babe’s back and tried to keep it pure.

“_Attention, passengers: the 10:30 bus to Mobile, Alabama is now boarding. Please have your tickets and stowed luggage ready._”

They pulled apart, rearranging their clothes and discreetly wiping away stray tears. Babe’s rosary went back under his shirt, and the outline of it beneath white cotton was a whole new dialect of guilt Gene didn’t have the fortitude to confront. He picked up his bag instead. “You ready?” At Babe’s nod, he led the way into the terminal.

They’d just entered the main ticketing lobby when a man going the other way pushed past them, shrugging a battered backpack over one shoulder. Gene looked up at his face, not meaning anything by it, just out of habit--

But there wasn’t one. 

He jerked back, colliding against Babe.

“Jesus, you okay?”

Gene didn’t answer, craning around Babe’s shoulder to follow the man’s progress, and he turned to look back at Gene, his body language the self-conscious, almost-but-not-quite-offended tilt of someone who doesn’t know why a stranger is staring at them. Then he turned and kept walking out the door.

“Gene?”

Gene realized he was clutching Babe’s arm, that Babe had his hand on his back, that he was scanning the room for danger as though he was a half-second away from flinging himself in front of it. “That man, he…” he looked at Babe, but words failed him.

“You know him?” Babe’s voice went a little hard around the edges.

“No.” Gene shook his head and pulled away. “I don’t know him. I guess I just thought I saw something.”

Babe let him go reluctantly. “You’re in a curse dream, maybe you _did_ see something.”

Gene wasn’t listening. He scanned the crowds around them, and now that he was paying attention, he saw it: _none_ of them had faces. A cold frisson ran down his spine. A whole crowd of them, acting like normal people despite the--the _blankness_ where their faces should have been.

“Babe,” he said, forcing his voice to stay level. “You see everyone’s faces, right?”

“What? Yeah, of course I--” He cut off, and Gene didn’t know whether to be glad or even more unnerved. “Okay,” he said, his voice shaky. “I thought I’d seen everything this bullshit curse could pull out, but this is new.”

The last fucking thing Gene wanted was to get on a bus surrounded by these creepy, faceless strangers, but staying in creepy, faceless New Orleans wouldn’t be any better. Somehow, in less than a heartbeat, the dream had recreated the exact terror Gene had felt leaving his home state. Leaving _his_ people, his home, and venturing out to where the people were strangers who didn’t know him from another blank face in the crowd. He reached back and grabbed Babe’s hand.

“I’m here,” Babe said, and it wasn’t much, but Gene felt a little better.

He girded his loins and led the way through the lobby and out the back, toward the long rows of waiting buses. 

Theirs looked exactly like all the other buses: Greyhound, a little battered, but rumbling with the purr of a well-tuned engine. Faceless mothers comforted their faceless children; faceless couples kissed goodbye without lips; faceless uniforms took luggage from faceless boarders and stowed it beneath the coach. Gene pulled so close to Babe they bumped shoulders. The woman ahead of them gave them a look Gene recognized even without a face to see, and he stared right back until she turned around in discomfort. Score one for the gay agenda.

“This ain’t even that bad,” Babe said wonderingly. “Weird, I guess, but this is it?”

“Don’t think it’s meant for you,” Gene said, keeping his eyes lowered. He breathed through his nerves and unease. Forced a smile. “Feel like I walked into a Magritte painting.”

“Who’s Magritte?”

Gene shook his head. “I’ll show you when we get on board.”

The line moved quickly. Gene gave his ticket to the bus driver without looking at his unface, Babe doing the same, and they pushed down the aisle, past the rows of unfaced people settling themselves down, until they’d found two seats about two thirds down and staked their claim. It was the same row Gene had picked three years ago; he recognized that dubious stain on the seatback in front of him. Last time, a matronly black woman had sat down next to him. She’d been visiting her grandkids and now was headed back home, and she’d reminded Gene so sharply of his own Mémé that he hadn’t been able to talk much for the lump in the throat. 

He sat his bag on his knees like he had then, winding his arms through the straps and hugging himself, and he felt the shift of the seven-day candle against his knees. Fuck, how had he had the wherewithal to go all the way to Pennsylvania? He didn’t remember it hurting this badly.

“Hey.” Babe nudged his shoulder against Gene’s. “You said you were gonna show me about that Magritte guy?”

“Right, yeah.” Gene pulled out his phone and opened an image search, but Babe cut him off.

“Whoa, hold on, what’s that?”

Gene looked between him and his phone. Oh, man. “It’s a cellphone,” he said. “Like a telephone, but future-style.”

“That ain’t no telephone,” Babe said, but his eyes had lit up. “It don’t got wires or antennas or nothing.”

“It runs off rechargeable battery cells,” Gene said. “The antenna is built into the frame.”

“No fuckin’ _way_,” Babe said in absolute delight. “Can I see?”

Gene handed it over, and with the glee of a kid on Christmas, Babe poked his way through it. Gene gave him a few pointers, explained texting, and tried to explain the internet--even dug up a few Magritte paintings like he’d meant to in the first place--but he didn’t think Babe really understood how large and multifaceted it was. There’d be time for that, Gene supposed.

“Why would anyone want to take a picture of themselves?” Babe asked, his brow wrinkling in confusion.

Gene snorted. “Sorry,” he said at Babe’s affront. “It's just, there's a whole subculture around taking the best selfies.”

Babe’s expression turned dubious. “You sure you ain’t pulling my leg?”

“Nope.”

“Well, hell.” He flipped the camera and dragged Gene in. “Can’t let 'em have all the fun. Smile, Gene, you're catching flies.”

He snapped an absolutely awful selfie of the both of them. “Wow, that's worse than the photobooth at the fair.”

“Gimme that,” Gene said, snatching his phone back. It was a decent pic of Babe, he was smiling goofily, but his jawline was perfectly highlighted. Gene looked worse than his ID photo. He grunted. 

“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Babe said as Gene put it back in his pocket. “_Gadgets_.” He waved a hand. “This, it’s a futuristic-looking bus, but it’s still a bus, you know? I thought we’d be flying around in spaceships by now, like Flash Gordon.”

“We sent men to the moon in the Sixties,” Gene said, and smiled at Babe’s squawk.

“Gene! You’ve got _spaceships_ and you’re taking the damn _bus_?”

“It’s not like that,” he tried to say, but Babe wasn’t having it.

“I swear to God Himself, the future is the most boring place! You’ve got spaceships and you take the bus! You’ve got an encyclopedia, camera, and calculator all mashed into a phone that can fit in your pocket, but you don’t have jetpacks! Hell, that phone is basically the _only_ gadget I’ve seen--”

A little girl sitting in the seat in front of them with her mother turned around and shushed Babe. Put her little finger up to where her mouth wasn’t, and shushed him like a librarian. Babe shut up mid-sentence, his face bright red.

Gene started laughing so hard he stopped making sound. He sagged against Babe, and strangled gasps were all he could get out.

“She just--and you--”

“Yeah, yeah, shut up,” Babe muttered, but he didn’t shrug Gene off. “It’s not that funny.”

“‘Dear Diary--today--Babe got told off--_by a five-year-old--’_”

“You’re no kind of friend, you know that?”

Gene laughed himself out and sat slumped against the window, smiling, the sun at his back. “Friend, huh?”

“Well.” Babe slouched comfortably in his seat, his knees splaying wide. He eyed Gene. “With benefits, maybe.”

Gene snorted. “You learn too damn fast.”

Babe grinned cheerfully. “Paratrooper. Best of the best.”

Gene sobered like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “Babe, I’m. I’m sorry I didn’t save your friends.”

Babe’s expression went a little soft and broken at that, then firmed up as he put his walls back up. “They both died anyway. Medics were too busy helping other people, and no one else who knew what to do got there in time.” He picked at the fabric over his knee. “I’ve seen them die so many times, I think I’m almost getting used to it. Ain’t that a terrible thing to say?” His eyes cut to Gene before looking away. “I’m getting used to seeing my buddies die bloody.”

Gene felt so low, thinking he was bad off when Babe was right here, who’d fought in an entire war and then got cursed in recompense. “I think that’s human,” he said.

“You think?” Babe’s expression was bleak, doubtful. 

Gene reached for his hand and twined their fingers together. “It’s the only reason people can survive a war at all,” he said to Babe’s knuckles.

Babe’s hand clenched a little. “I ain’t got any right to be here, when they gave everything.”

Gene squeezed back, and a bit of Holy warmth filled him, though he hadn’t asked for it. “‘Right’ doesn’t mean much, when it comes down to who lives or dies. But I’m glad I got to meet you, so I’m glad you survived. I’ll be selfish for you.”

Babe’s breath came shaky, and his grip on Gene’s fingers tightened almost to the point of pain. “I don’t want to see you die too, Gene.”

“You won’t,” Gene said softly.

“You can’t know that.”

Four people. Gene swallowed. “If I have to call up every Verret in Assumption, I will. I’m not gonna leave it to chance.” 

Babe pulled in a ragged breath. “Don’t make me hope, Gene. I can’t… I can’t, okay?”

Gene leaned forward and kissed him, just a brush of lips, and sat back. He stared at Babe’s face, taking in the sharp line of his nose, the freckles over his cheeks, the way his hair fell over his high forehead. They sat surrounded by caricatures of Gene’s own alienation--he was man enough to admit his own fears--and it didn’t matter, because Babe was known. Babe was… Gene didn’t even know, but he knew he didn’t want to keep living like this, where every person around him was a threat or an empty set of clothes to negotiate around. Babe was the first real face he’d seen in three years.

In the back of his head, he felt the curse rumbling in dissatisfaction. 

On impulse, he hooked one of his knees over Babe’s. “Tell me about your family,” he said.

Babe startled, looking at Gene’s leg, then around the bus; but no one turned their way. Cautiously, he put his hand down over Gene’s thigh. Gene bit his lip, every scrap of his innards from his collarbones on down heating and tightening up at the touch. 

“Well, um.” Babe took a fortifying breath. “Well, there’s my ma, she took care of all of us, and some of the neighborhood kids too, like my pal Tony, we were always falling over each other, basically lived in each other’s pockets…”

He spoke, Gene listened, and the miles flew by.


	5. Chapter 5

The scratches were definitely infected. The skin around them was swollen tight as a drum, ominous red streaks beginning to creep up his wrist. Gene hissed, prodding them gently. A small bubble of pus oozed out from under one of the scabs. He was hotter, too. Running a low-grade temp. His tender, Louisiana-bred hide was usually freezing during the winter, but he’d had to strip off his sweatshirt barely five minutes after putting it on. He made sure the cordon was still in place. It was the only thing keeping the infection from going systemic, though God only knew how much longer it would last. 

Renée wasn’t back, either. She hadn't called, or texted, or sent a fucking carrier pigeon. He assumed she was with a friend, or maybe even her parents, who lived out in Wilmington. Gene didn't know what to expect on that front, but he had to do _something_. If just to figure out whether he should post an ad for a roommate and start cleaning out Renée’s bedroom.

First things first, though. He ran the water in the kitchen sink till it was hot, filled his biggest mixing bowl, then poured in as much salt as the water would take. A salt soak was chewing gum on a crack in a dam, at this point, but it was better than nothing. And it wasn't like he could go to a hospital with curse scratches.

His hand slowly pruned from the brine, and he contemplated what he had to do. He’d already told Babe he would; it looked like God called his bluff. The scabs softened and streams of pus coiled out into the water. Gene bit his lip against the sting.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket with his other hand and brought up his call history. His thumb hovered over his grandmother’s name. He hesitated. Shame curled up in him like suppuration. He grit his teeth. The only way to heal was to face the hurt and let it out. He _knew_ that. But hurts of the heart ached so much worse than hurts of the body.

He hit her name quickly, like pulling off a bandaid. He forced himself to breath slowly as the phone rang.

“Allo?” He could hear other voices in the background. Maybe a healing, maybe a family shindig. Either way: fuck.

“Bonjour, Mémé,” he said, and winced.

“Eugène?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

He heard a scuffle on the other end; a male voice, either his brother Hal’s or his cousin Mike’s, raised in a question.

“All of you hush! Yes, it’s Eugène, can’t you see I’m on the phone?”

“GENE!” multiple voices raised at once in a bellow, loud enough Gene could hear it through the phone. It fell into a babble of noise after that, but he heard at least one “We miss you!” His heart cramped, and he breathed out a sigh of hurt. God, he missed home.

Mémé yelled something back at them--it was obscured, she’d pulled the receiver away and there were too many other voices to make hers out clearly. But then there was the sound of movement, and a door closing, and then quiet; and Gene knew she'd closed herself in the pantry, where she always went when she or the person on the line needed privacy. Didn’t matter that the landline was at least ten years in the grave; she still took her cell phone into the pantry rather than anywhere else. Gene remembered back as a small boy, wandering in to see the phone cord stretched across the kitchen, from the jack in the wall to the pantry door.

“She’s got a patient who’s shy,” Uncle Uli, his godfather, had explained once.

Gene supposed he _was_ shy. He loved his family, but he couldn't face them, yet. Hal loved him, always would, but his brother was an idiot hick, Mike too, and Gene couldn't use them as a benchmark for the rest of the family.

“Now, cher, you tell me what’s got you calling.”

Gene stared fixedly down at his hand, distorted from the water and pink from the heat. “I need help, Mémé. To finish out the curse.”

“I’ll be there,” she said immediately. “Give me your address, I’ll see myself to New Orleans for a flight as soon as we’re done.”

Gene gave a sigh that wasn't _quite_ a sob of relief. He gave it to her. “I don’t think I’ll be able to pick you up at the airport,” he said, feeling like yesterday’s garbage. “I barely got myself out of bed this morning.”

“That's alright, mon petit chou. You let me worry about that, huh?”

Every bit of his trained-in respect for his elders screamed out against that, but he’d gotten winded just walking down the hallway to the kitchen. There’s no way he’d make it to the airport and back. “Okay.” 

They chatted for a while longer, until the water was tepid. Gene pulled his hand out and rested it on the edge of the bowl to let it air dry. “How’s…” he bit his lip. “How’s Hal doing?”

“He misses you fierce, Gene. You, and your papa both.”

Gene didn’t have a free hand to run down his face, or he would have. Christ. Guilt threatened to eat him alive. “I didn’t…” he trailed off, not sure what he was going to say. Didn’t mean to run away two days after their father went back to the oil rig? Didn’t mean to leave Hal alone like that, on the anniversary of their mother’s death? Didn’t mean to kill their cousin? “Tell him I’m sorry,” he said, as weak as the bullshit these northerners called spice. His face crumpled in a spasm of misery, but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t change his own past actions, and he couldn’t see a way forward other than by proving, once and for all, that he really was as useless as he’d made out. His grandmother had never left Louisiana in her life, and now Gene was dragging her across the country because he couldn’t handle a curse.

“Oh, mon Eugène,” she said softly in his ear. “I’ll be there as soon as I can, non? And you hold on.”

He dragged in a tight breath. “Okay.”

“You got your mama’s rosary?”

It was wrapped around the hand holding the phone. His fingers clenched against the plastic of his phone case. “Yeah.”

“Pray it for me, mon Eugène. When we hang up, you pray the Glorious Mysteries, and I will come as quickly as possible.”

“Okay,” he said, with barely any voice. “Thank you.”

“I’ll be there, cher. You hold on.”

***

Gene woke to the sound of a key scraping in the lock. He raised his head, disoriented utterly, and blinked in puzzlement at the sight of the living room. Then the door opened, and Renée came in, a suitcase in one hand and Piggy’s carrier in the other. Gene stared at her, uncertain if he was still dreaming.

“Hi,” she said, her voice real as anything. “You look like hell.”

“Uh,” he said. “You’re back.”

She kicked the door closed, a drawn, nervous expression on her face, and set down her luggage. “If I’d known you’d fall apart this much, I wouldn’t have left at all.” She let Piggy out of his cage, and puzzle or not, he immediately raced out and jumped on Gene’s stomach.

Gene hugged him close to keep him from falling off as he pushed himself up. “I didn’t--_fall apart_,” he said, trying very hard not to think about how he’d had to literally crawl to bed the night before.

“Gene, it’s the middle of the day and you’re not at work.”

He concentrated on scratching Piggy’s ears rather than looking at Renée. “They sent me home. I was a safety hazard.”

“You _lost_ your _job_?”

“No! Sick leave!”

“Oh. Okay.”

Gene risked a glance at her, and her cheeks were flushed pink. She wasn’t looking at him, instead fiddling with her keys. Piggy had had enough of him now that he was sitting up, so he hopped down to go sniff things. Gene stared at the puzzle, still laid out on the coffee table. “So,” he began, then paused to run his hand over his mouth. “If you’re back, you should know that my grandmother’s coming up.”

Renée turned back, her eyes wide. “Your grandmother is coming to Philadelphia?”

“Yeah. I, uh. I need help. I can’t finish this curse on my own, so she’s gonna help me.”

Renée sat down in her comfy chair. “I was gonna wait to bring this up,” she began. “But I think now is good, too.”

Gene braced himself. Nothing good ever came from a lead-in like that.

She took a deep breath. “You’re right, I did see something I can’t explain. And that puzzle _is_ weird.” She knotted her hands in front of her. “I’m sorry I ran like that, Gene. I’ve got--I’ve got my own past. My last boyfriend was--well, you met him. He was very controlling. Abusive. Tried to change my perceptions of reality. Convinced me everything I saw or heard wasn’t the way I saw or heard it. So…” she waved a hand at the puzzle. “This? It felt like you were doing that, at first.”

Gene felt winded. “I wouldn’t… Renée, I would _never_\--”

“I know, I _know_,” Renée said, putting her face in her hands. “I wouldn’t have moved in with you if you had been anything like him.” She was quiet for a while, her face in her hands. “But I saw something. I know I did. And you didn’t try to tell me I didn’t. So…” she sighed and lowered her hands. “So, if it’s okay, I’d like to…” She squared her shoulders and met his gaze. “I’d like to watch, tonight. While you work.”

Gene bowed his head in relief. Then he made himself look up and smile, so she wouldn’t think he was saying no. “Mais, yeah,” he said. “Not a problem.”

She gave a small smile in return, but it was still nervous. Gene didn’t blame her; a curse-breaking was no way to learn about miracles.

She paused and sniffed. “Did you cook?”

Gene shrugged. “I got restless last night. Didn’t know what else to do. You can have some, if you want. It’s gumbo.”

She looked at him strangely. “I’ve known you for two years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look or act as Cajun as you have in the past week.”

Gene glanced to the puzzle, then away. “I’ve been forced to open up to it. The rest just… happened.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon stepping awkwardly around each other, trying to re-learn the ease they’d built up over two years. Eventually, Gene just went to his room. Tried to sort laundry, but got tired halfway through. Ended up laying on his bed, pretending to read about the Merovingians, but really napping. Piggy wandered in to sniff at his toes at one point, and he heard Renée muttering over her notes in her bedroom. Something in him settled.

***

A distant part of Gene’s mind was aware of Renée fidgeting. She wasn’t the worst witness he’d had to deal with; antagonistic, doubtful loved ones were the worst, followed by badly-trained, nasty children. But what she was was nervous, and that bled over. Gene pulled himself from the puzzle enough to say to her, “It’s alright to move. You won't distract me.”

She gulped, her expression stricken, and left her chair for the kitchen in a trice. Had he not been in the trance, Gene might have remembered the frights his own family had given him in the midst of a healing. There was something _more_ to a traiteur when they were channeling, and it made them look desperately wrong to the unaided eye. Beautiful and terrible as the dawn, Gene had thought as a boy, when he’d still read fantasy.

He might have remembered all that, had the puzzle not been the whole of his focus. The clack of his rosary against the table, his metronome. The flicker of the candle on the edge of his sight, the slim barrier between him and reality. The pieces beneath his fingers: his purpose. His wrist didn’t ache; his muscles weren’t sore; his stomach didn’t heave from nauseous hunger. He was the Hand of God, and beneath his fingers the curse knit itself into oblivion.

He didn’t notice when she returned, calmer, and with a fresh mug of tea. Her eyes were on him and the unerring dance of his fingers from piece to join, but he did not see; her budding belief aided him nonetheless.

Time passed. Renée witnessed. Gene worked. The puzzle grew.

“Oh, God,” a voice said into the hallowed space, a prayer of intercession only half-aware. Gene looked up, but Renée did not look back, her eyes fixed upon the shape in the corner: the skeleton, Babe’s revenant, healing as Gene healed him. The space beneath his ribs was filled with viscera, now: stomach, liver, spleen, intestines; the largest addition to his body since he had manifested muscle.

There were eyes in his sockets, now. Peeled and lidless, their gaze fixed on Gene.

“Al tirah,” Gene did not say to Renée, for they were not his words, and it wasn’t his intent which spoke them.

Babe hobbled toward him on half-muscled legs, Renée following his progress with a stricken expression. Gene felt time pressing on him; the end of the trance was nigh. The candle guttered beside him.

Babe knelt, and it went out.

Gene knew the worst sort of fear at the terrible drain of energy from his limbs, like a great, crushing weight had been set over his body, and the life was being pressed from him. He gasped for breath, his muscles weak and straining. Babe reached out a hand to him, and Gene didn’t feel bone and raw tendon on his forehead, but warm skin and calluses. His eyes fluttered closed.

“Gonna have to get you some pants next time,” he wheezed, and Babe’s gentle touch turned into a flick against his ear. Gene smiled. Christ, he could barely think for sick exhaustion, but he managed a smile. He looked up at Babe, looked into those dark eyes, and just _was_. Babe had made it through another day, and Gene would see him through the rest, come Hell or high water.

With that thought fresh in Gene’s mind, Babe faded away. Gene turned his head aside. He didn’t want to be alone, couldn’t face it.

A hand shook him gently awake. “Gene,” a voice said. “Gene wake up, you need to drink this.”

Gene was warm and soft and tired, so tired, but the voice was insistent. A hand raised his head, and he felt a warm mug at his lip, and he opened his mouth. That was all he could do. That, and swallow the sweetened milk poured down his throat. The mug paused every so often, to let him breathe. He opened his eyes, and Renée was there, blurry and unfocused.

She slowly poured it into him, and he felt himself perk up a little. Breathing was less hard, and his muscles trembled less. She set the empty mug aside and reached for the blanket they kept over the couch. 

“Believe me now?” He mumbled as she tucked it in around him.

“Go to sleep,” she said, and Gene did.

***

Someone was whistling. High-pitched and tuneless, without stopping for breath. Without breathing at all, and that's when Gene realized it was the wind.

He opened his eyes, and two things hit him: first, the deep, deafening roar of heavy engines by his ear; and second, the yawning void of open air before him. He stared down however many thousands of feet to the patchwork fields spread out below, and then he looked up, and saw dozens--no, hundreds of prop planes flying formation in a pretty blue sky. White circles of parachutes drifted from their sides like seeds off a dandelion flower.

“What the _fuck_,” he said. He felt himself say it, but he couldn't hear it over the roar of the propellers. Gene wasn't a man given to fear of heights, but there, standing in the doorway of an airplane, clearly primed to jump _out_ of it, he was more than ready to reconsider.

“Green light!” someone shouted behind him. “Go, go, go!”

Every joint in Gene’s body locked up, his hands clutching the sides of the door. “Are you fucking _serious_!”

“Jump, god damn it! That is an order, Technician!”

“No _fucking_\--”

A firm shove cut him off, and in a breathless moment of ball-clenching terror, Gene fell forward into the abyss.

He wondered if it was true, that you always woke up before you hit the ground.

Something behind him jerked, yanking back on his freefall, and Gene craned his head around to the most beautiful parachute he'd ever seen in his life. The world spun crazily, and Gene wasn't sure if it was from relief or turbulence. “Fuck,” he choked out, knotting his hands into his harness straps. They were pulling something awful. Whoever had laced him into this horrorshow had done him the great service of looking out for the family jewels, but there were still two straps going through his crotch, and they were the only things keeping his body out of gravity’s clutches.

The sound of the planes receded, and Gene’s heart slowed. Not all the way, the prospect of a landing was looming, but in the quiet space between earth and sky, when all he could do was sit tight and look, he did just that.

It was a startlingly beautiful day. There was a breeze this high, cool and refreshing, that was sweeping Gene and all the other paratroopers toward a series of tree-lined fields. A raised road cut through them, a horse-drawn hay cart trundling along atop it about a mile away.

There was no mistaking the entrenchments Gene could see further out, though. Or the shell craters, or the rubble of what used to be a town. Gene looked for as long as he could, until he suddenly realized the trees were coming up faster than he’d thought. He reached up and yanked on the parachute cords like he’d seen people do in Youtube vids, but his course didn’t change; all that happened was he rocked side to side, rotating like a top beneath the fixed point of his canopy, and all _that_ did was make him nauseous. He drew up his legs to avoid the treetops--it was a near fucking miss--and then he was dropping down to some poor farmer’s field, which was sprouting soldiers instead of wheat. It was an easier landing than he was afraid of. He stumbled to a running stop and straightened, peering back up at the sky as his parachute deflated around him. If he hadn’t actually been dreaming, the spectacle of a thousand parachutes descending would have made him think he was.

Then the breeze, which hadn’t seemed like much at all, picked up and caught his collapsed parachute, draped behind him like a lost bedsheet. It fluttered back open as he watched.

“Whoa, Gene, hold up!”

Gene turned on a dime, eyes scanning the field--and Babe was right there, right beside him, closer than he was expecting.

He jerked back in surprise. The wind gusted, filling his parachute, and it took off like a sail. If Gene had had his feet braced, he might have been able to weather it; but as it was, he staggered three uneven steps to the side, dragged by his own chute, before falling on his ass and getting bodily hauled away over a tussock.

“Shit!”

He grabbed for any handhold, but nothing held. The parachute billowed, and Gene reached up to grab the risers, thinking maybe if he hauled it back in he could--

“I gotcha!” Babe grabbed Gene’s jump harness. He jerked Gene forward, buying slack from the parachute, and quickly loosened the buckle. “You’re lucky you didn’t break an ankle on that landing,” he said, batting Gene’s shaky hands away as he stripped the harness off his shoulders. “Don’t know how that’d work in reality.”

“I’d probably have a broken ankle when I woke up,” Gene replied, breathless and riding the sharp edge of adrenaline. “Got a couple scratches on my arms the first dream, had ‘em when I woke up.”

“What, really?” Babe looked him over, as though he could see where Gene was hurt through the canvas of his--yep, his medic uniform. The curse really had a one-track mind.

Babe was wearing his dress uniform, though, like on his service photo. Gene stared, then looked away because he was staring. It wasn't much more flattering than a filthy combat uniform, but it was different. Babe was cleaned up and neatly-pressed, his hair shining where it showed beneath his cap.

“--c’mon, is it bad?”

Gene focused back on what Babe was saying. “What?”

“The _scratch_, Gene, is it bad?”

Gene looked down at his arm, covered in his sleeve. “It is when I’m awake. It got infected.”

“Shit.” Babe pulled his arm up and started unbuttoning the cuff. “I swear, if you get this far and the curse fucking kills you with a _scratch_ I’m gonna hunt that lady down and haunt her in Hell, so help me God--”

“She's still alive,” Gene said, his skin tingling where Babe’s fingers touched. “The, uh, the woman who cursed you? She's still alive.”

Babe’s fingers stilled on Gene’s wrist. “She's still _alive_?” His forehead scrunched. “Jesus, she'd have to be almost a hundred, or something.”

Gene stared at Babe’s hands on his. They were good, strong hands. The nails weren’t bitten, but there was a bruise under one. Calluses scraped where he touched Gene’s skin, sending frissons down Gene’s spine. Babe wasn't afraid of using his hands. Gene swallowed, imagining Babe using those hands on him. “Think the curse is keeping her alive. It feeds off her hate, but it's forcing her to stay alive.”

“Good,” Babe said, baring Gene’s wrist to the sky. “I’m sure she's a very nice woman, yadda yadda, but she locked me in a fucking puzzle for three-quarters of a century, so she looks like a bitch to me.” He stared down at the suppurant scabs and a muscle in his cheek jumped. When he spoke, it was softly. “I’ve got a fucking bone to pick with her.”

“Four bones,” Gene said, like a complete moron, but he was stuck staring at Babe's face, and he didn't know how to look away. The adrenaline of the landing, Babe saving his bacon, and now… this painful tenderness. Gene didn't have much thought to spare on making his words come out pretty.

Babe looked up, and their eyes locked together. Gene felt it like a burst of heat down his spine. They didn't say anything, Gene couldn't remember what words _were_, there was only Gene Roe, staring into Babe Heffron’s dark eyes, and the anvil-strike of connection that shivered between them. Gene couldn't look away, for all that his skin prickled with the need to. 

“Hey Babe, Doc, quit holding hands and get a move on,” barked a short, grumpy-looking man with a mess of stripes on his sleeve, who was trudging past them over the fallow rows.

It was the pressure wave of release after a hurricane passed. Gene took a breath; Babe’s fingers squeezed spasmodically before he dropped Gene’s wrist.

“Yeah, Sarge.” Babe started walking, and Gene followed his lead, abandoning the parachute and harness the way everyone else seemed to be.

“Hey, Babe,” Gene said, hurrying to catch up. “Why aren’t you wearing what everyone else is?”

Babe looked down at his dress uniform, a worried frown on his face. “Dunno,” he said. “I was already on the ground, watching youse land.” His hands clenched at his sides. “Don't even have a rifle, I feel naked. Like the Krauts’ll sight me any second, like me having my M1 would make any kind of difference.”

“Maybe it's the curse,” Gene ventured.

“I don't know, Gene,” Babe said with a heavy eye-roll. “The _curse_ did it? You sure about that?”

“Maybe it's learning,” Gene said with a withering glare. “I don't think it was too happy, last dream. You seen anything like this before?”

Babe glanced up at the sky at the retreating planes, then around them, at the seemingly-quiet fields and copses. “No. Not once.”

They made their way off the field and into the narrow strip of woods that bordered it. The trees were old, but nothing like the gnarled oaks and sweet-scented magnolias of Belle River. “You know where we are?” Gene asked.

“Holland,” Babe replied shortly, walking with his knees bent, his boots making almost no sound against the forest litter. “Operation Market Garden. We came out on the Arnhem road, met up with British tankers and caught a ride. Now though… guess we’ll find out.”

Gene followed beside him, and if it hadn’t been for the olive-drab shadows passing around them, it would almost have been like hunting deer with Uncle Uli. Babe’s expression was grim and set, his eyes roving; even without a gun, he looked dangerous. He looked back and put a finger over his lips. Gene nodded, his heart pounding. 

He didn't belong here. He was decked out like a medic, but he barely knew how to use the tools in his bag. If a German soldier shot him, if _anyone_ got shot, he’d be as useless as he had been to Bill, and Thomasine before that. He clung to Babe's side, trying not to get in the way.

Sunlight filtered down through the trees. Insects hummed past their faces. Gene couldn’t make out any animal sounds, like in the last dream, but the leaves rustled overhead, and it seemed so still and calm, like nothing bad could ever happen here. 

Gunshots rang out up ahead. They stopped in unison. Gene looked to Babe, but he made a “keep low” gesture and listened, frowning. There was shouting, too, Gene realized, but not the bellow of orders or screams of the injured. It sounded more like a riot. He couldn't figure out where it might be coming from, though; he hadn't seen any crowds but their own, from the jump.

That’s when he realized he heard singing, too.

“Wait a minute,” Babe said, his frown deepening. He stood, Gene following a half-second later, and pressed forward, toward the tree break. They shoved their way through the bushes, branches catching at their clothes, and for a brief moment, they were in a silent tunnel of green, the smell of fresh sap sharp in Gene’s nose. Then they were out, and Gene’s feet landed on rough cobblestones, not soft earth. The scent of turned earth and leaf litter faded out into the sooty, rancid trash smells of an alley. He looked back, but the hedgerow was gone; only a solid brick wall pasted over with tattered playbills and advertisements in a language he couldn't read.

"You recognize any of this?" he asked Babe.

"Yeah," Babe said, sounding shaken. "This is Eindhoven. Jesus."

The gunshots were closer now, but they didn’t sound right. The shouting, too, though now it didn't sound so much like a riot as... a party? Gene was sure he heard singing, now, and the scrape of half-tuned instruments. Diesel fumes wafted down to them, followed by the growling roar of heavy engines. Babe led the way to the mouth of the alley.

Orange flags draped from every window. The flags that weren't orange were the blue, red, and white stripes of a foreign flag. Gene thought French immediately, but they were oriented wrong. All around them, people were cheering and laughing, pouring each other wine and beer and waving their little flags at the procession of military tanks moving down the main road. A loud pop by Gene’s ear had him ducking, but it turned out to be someone opening a bottle of champagne.

"Is this after the war?" Gene asked, baffled.

"No," Babe replied. "Not even close. But we pushed the Nazis out of their town, sort of, so they threw us a party."

A matron came up and thrust a massive loaf of bread into Gene's hands, steaming fresh; he clutched at it without thinking, and the crust crackled beneath his fingers. "What--thank you?" She babbled something heartfelt and smiling at him, but he'd be damned if he knew what it meant.

"Just go with it," Babe told him, reaching out to rip off a hunk with a smile of his own. He seemed to be loosening up from the tension in the woods, though he was still wary. "The food is the best you'll ever fucking eat." His eyes closed as he stuffed his face. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he moaned.

Gene took a smaller piece and ate it with more reserve, nodding again at the woman as Babe dragged him forward into the crowd. It _was_ good bread.

Babe grabbed Gene's wrist, towing him along. It wasn't quite holding hands, but close enough to get by, Gene thought. He passed a clutch of children running loose through the crowd and dropped the bread into their hands. He didn't know what the curse would pull up this time, but Gene would rather have at least one hand free. Babe pushed toward the tanks.

"Hey, Plesha, what's the word?" Babe called up to someone riding one of the tanks like it was a tractor.

"Peacock's about to blow a gasket," Plesha called back, an expression of bright-eyed excitement on his face. "Welsh and Winters are trying to move us along, I already bet Hoobs we won’t get to Nuenen before the end of the week, the rate we’re going!"

"No rush!" Babe replied with a laugh. "Let's stay here for as long as they'll have us!"

"Say, Babe," one of the others said, hanging off the tank cannon turret. "Where's your weapon?"

"I, uh, I lost it in the jump.”

"In _that_ jump? That easy fucking landing? Babe, come on! It's your _first jump_!"

"Yeah, yeah, Martin'll kill me, I know," Babe said, sounding aggrieved.

Gene listened to the byplay with half an ear, but kept his eyes on the road. What little of the road he could see. He didn't know a whole lot about WWII, but Babe had said there were still Nazis in Holland, and everyone but Babe was dressed for a fight. There was an itch between his shoulder blades that had him looking for his cousin Mike hiding in the bushes, a cowpat in hand.

"Thank you!" someone shouted in a thickly accented voice.

"Welcome to Eindhoven!" another shouted.

Gene kept glancing to Babe, but Babe was occupied with catching up with his squaddies. There had to be something else. Something more was coming.

"Hey, Babe," he said. "Think maybe we should try and see what's up."

"Huh?" Babe turned around, his cheeks flushed and his eyes bright. He sobered when he saw Gene. "Oh, yeah. Dunno that we have to look for anything, though, the curse usually does it's thing whether we go looking for it or not. May as well party, you ask me!"

"Alright," Gene said slowly. He'd generally avoided parties. Not that he hated fun, no matter what Hal said, but he didn't see a lot of point to it. He had better things to do, like get the septic tank pumped. Or pick bugs off the cucumbers.

He tried to hide it, but Babe caught his reluctance, anyway. "Hey," he said. "Let's go up there, see what the chow's like." He pointed to a business, Gene figured a restaurant or café by all the chairs out front. "They opened all the restaurant doors, just gave the food away for free. It was incredible."

He pulled Gene along, and they wove their way deeper into the crowd, passing soldiers and civilians alike. Gene finally found himself loosening up. It felt safer, packed in with people. He wasn't a target like this; he had herd immunity. 

He kept checking faces as they walked. Turning around to make sure they were _people_, not horror-movie homunculi, though it was idiotic to check for allies in a curse dream. None of them were real. None of them could be trusted.

Babe was smiling. There was a manic gleam in his eye, as he threw chatter back and forth with the Dutch people celebrating their liberation. Someone pushed a bottle of beer into his hand, and he took a long pull before passing it back to Gene. "Try it!" he half-shouted by Gene's ear, to be heard over the din. "Miles better than the horse piss they serve in the camp canteens!"

Gene dutifully took a swig. It was pretty good, better than most American beers he'd tried, other than the microbrewery stuff he sometimes got, and which Hal laughed at him for (he had Hal’s number, though. He'd seen the homebrew kit in his kitchen). When Babe's attention skewed away, he passed it along to another soldier nearby, who looked utterly blitzed by the atmosphere. Gene wished him well. But his sense of unease only increased. Babe wasn't really _present_; he was partying to stave off fear, not to genuinely celebrate. Gene didn't know what it would be like, to spend seventy years trapped in a curse, but he figured there were probably some maladaptive coping mechanisms at play, or whatever Tante Linda would say. Babe was eating, drinking, and being merry, because he knew, sooner or later, he'd die.

"Hey Babe, Gene, come take a picture with us!" one of the soldiers ahead cried out, a cheery-faced fellow with his hair flopping boyishly into his face and a couple of grenades draped around his neck. Babe hauled Gene over with a "Hey, Hoobs!" and joined the lineup. A whole mess of Dutch kids and American GIs, decked out in orange and the weapons of war. Babe positioned Gene between him and a severe-looking soldier with deep-set eyes and a quiet voice, from the north--Brooklyn, maybe?--like all these soldiers seemed to be. Gene didn't want to be here. He wanted anything but to be here, let alone getting his picture taken.

"Ja, look this way!" the cameraman said, holding the flashbulb over his head. Gene looked his way, but then Babe grabbed his collar, and suddenly they were kissing, and Gene was blinded by the flash. There was a heartbeat of silence, as he stared at Babe. Babe stared back, his face gone milk-white.

"I didn't think," he said, and it wasn't until he spoke aloud that Gene realized how quiet it had gotten. He looked around.

Hundreds of people were packed into the street, and all of them had turned their eyes to him and Babe. A rooster crowed in the distance. Further off was the rattatat of small arms fire, followed by a low boom. Gene flushed hot, then cold as ice in January.

"Babe," he said, but Babe wasn't looking at him. Gene followed his gaze. A group of angry-looking Dutch men pressed forward out of the crowd.

"Are you fucking kidding me," Babe said, his hand on Gene's arm tight to the point of pain. "No way."

"Babe, what--"

One of the men shouted something at Babe, and everyone around them--all the soldiers, all the children, even Hoobs, who'd been so joyous and laughing moments before, pulled back like they were riddled with plague. The men rushed them. Gene brought up his fists, even managed to clock one across the ear, but they knocked him aside; Babe was their target. Gene staggered to his feet and trailed after, as the crowd started making noise again, a dull roar of fury that set a chill so deep in Gene's bones he felt half in the grave.

"Babe!" he shouted, but his voice couldn't reach above the noise of the mob. "BABE!"

"Gene!" he heard in reply, a distant, terrified cry.

Gene elbowed his way through the crowd, forcing his way forward toward Babe's voice. He could hear him: he was yelling, fighting back, but there was an edge of terror to it that Gene remembered from the artillery shelling. He threw elbows, he kicked, anything to make way. Gone were the accommodating townsfolk of Eindhoven; these were strangers, cruel, their eyes washed out with disdain and suspicion.

"I'm a medic, let me through!" Gene yelled, even though he was no such thing; maybe, in a time of war, they would respect the red cross even if they didn't respect the man.

The crowd gave grudging way, and Gene found himself on the edge of a circle of jeering townsfolk, surrounding--Gene shook his head, unable to comprehend.

There were three women. Their dresses were torn, and their heads were being roughly shaved by furious-looking men. They were crying, all of them; one was yelling back at the crowd, but it was in Dutch, and Gene didn't know what she was saying.

"What the _fuck_ is this?" Gene snapped, aghast.

"They slept with Nazis," a heavily-accented voice said, and Gene turned to see a tall, thin man, with piercing blue eyes and thinning hair. His expression was remorseless. "They were collaborators."

Gene looked back, less sure, now, of his righteousness; and it was then that he finally saw Babe. He wasn't kneeling, his dress uniform wasn't torn. But he stood at attention before a red-haired man with binoculars around his neck, whose expression was severe in its disappointment. Rank after rank of American GIs stood behind him--Babe’s company? All had different expressions on their faces, from sad, to angry, to disgusted; some didn’t look at all, staring instead at their own boots.

Even from all the way across the circle, Gene could see the fine tremor in Babe's shoulders. He tried to push his way out into it, to get to Babe by the most direct route, but the crowd threw him back. Their malice and disdain was an oily film against his skin.

He stopped trying to fight through them, and instead shoved his way sideways, weaving his way around the long way to where Babe stood. It took him a while; the red-haired officer--he had to be an officer--was saying something, but Gene couldn’t make it out, and he didn’t bother trying. He made best use of his elbows instead, and fought his way forward.

He stopped at the edge of the Americans’ lines. He looked at their hard faces, and their rifles, and Gene chose the lesser of two evils. He was close enough now to Babe that it didn’t make any difference.

“Babe!” he shouted. Babe’s eyes flicked toward him, but they returned almost immediately to the red-haired officer. Finally, Gene could hear what he was saying. 

“--Edward Heffron, you are hereby drummed from Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne Division," the officer said. Two sergeants stepped forward--Gene recognized Bill with a jolt, clean-shaven and hale, and the other was the grumpy one who'd snapped at them back on the field.

Babe said something, his face pinching, but it was too low for Gene to make out. Bill said something in reply, his face just as shattered.

"I didn't _mean_ to!" Babe cried, but it was too late. The other sergeant stepped forward, his face grim. He reached for the eagle-head patch on Babe's shoulder, and in one sharp tug, ripped it from the fabric of his coat.

Babe made a sound like he'd been shot in the gut.

"What is this?" Gene demanded of a nearby officer, who was so blond his hair was almost white. "What the hell is going on?"

"Stand down, Roe," the officer said. "It has to be done. He killed a man outside of combat, and subjected an innocent woman to the derision of society. He’s a disgrace to the uniform. This is justice."

Gene gazed around at the crowd, still hurling abuse at the women in the center of the circle. "You think public humiliation is justice? You don't think--” he cut himself off. There was no point arguing with a curse. He turned back to Babe instead. The sergeants had stripped him of his garrison cap, pulling the parachute patch off it, and the silver wings, which Gene only now noticed in their absence, were gone from his left breast.

"Don't fucking look!" Babe called out to him, his face creased in absolute agony. His eyes were closed; he couldn't look back at Gene. "Jesus Christ, Gene, please, just look away!"

"You're strong!" Gene shouted, echoing something his grandmother had said to countless clients. "Babe, you're strong!"

"Your boots, Private," the red-haired officer said, and if his tone hadn't been just as pained as Babe's expression, Gene would have socked him one in the face right there. "You are no longer allowed the privilege of jump boots or bloused trousers."

"Fuck," Babe said, his voice cracking. "Fuck!"

“Babe!” Gene yelled, pushing against the arms holding him back. “Babe, it's only a dream! It's the curse, Babe, it's not real!”

Babe cast him a look of red-faced misery, and Gene knew what he was thinking: _Doesn't mean it hurts any less_.

“Babe,” he said again, barely audible above the noise. _I’m here_. But words failed him. All he could do was stare at Babe, locking eye contact so fiercely he thought it would set him on fire with all he wanted Babe to understand, that he couldn't force out.

It seemed to be enough. Babe steeled himself and knelt down, hunching against the jeering crowd. He began untying his boots. Gene didn’t look away once, though he felt so acutely the humiliation that it prickled against his skin, that he could barely think past the pain of it. He owed Babe his witness.

When it was done, Babe tossed his boots on the cobblestones before him. His trouser legs were wrinkled, his hair mussed, and his jacket askew, but he stood tall before his commanding officer. He kept his back straight. His eyes were wet, but he didn’t cry. His stocking feet were so vulnerable, Gene didn’t know what to do with the maelstrom in his chest, but he knew that he’d break a hundred curses if it meant protecting Babe Heffron.

“You are no longer a paratrooper,” the officer said. “When we set up position, you will report to Battalion HQ for your marching orders.”

“Yes, sir,” Babe said, his voice sharp, and Gene knew in his bones it was to keep it from breaking. He pushed against the restraining arms once more, but they threw him back, and all of a sudden the crowd roared louder. The soldiers started bellowing, and Gene just barely saw Babe’s face, white with new terror, as he searched the crowd. “Gene?”

“Babe--” He tried to push his way back, but the mob was rising like the tide, and the small clearing collapsed in on itself, swallowing the victims within. “Babe!”

“Gene!”

“Babe, I’m--”

Gene threw himself awake, his heart pounding, the roar of the mob so loud in his ears he barely recognized his own living room. “No,” he gasped. “No, no…” 

He lurched off the couch, falling to his knees and crashing into the coffee table, sending it scraping across the carpet. The box clattered and fell to the floor.

“Gene?” Renée stood over him, a spooked expression on her face. “Are you alright?”

Gene didn’t answer. He splayed his hand over the puzzle, his mother’s rosary clattering against wood and bone. “Babe,” he said, willing with all his strength. “Babe, I’m here, it’s--I’m here!”

Slowly, like a picture with bad reception, the revenant wavered into sight. It was different, in the daylight: thin, almost transparent, like a ghost was supposed to be; there were no changes in its appearance from the night before, its body cavities were still full of organs awaiting their protective layers of muscle and skin, but it was kneeling beside Gene, and from the bow of its head, Gene knew that Babe was still caught in the dream.

He didn’t hesitate. He reached out and cradled the back of Babe’s skull--he felt only soft hair, fresh from a trim. “I’m awake,” he said. “It’s over.”

The revenant looked up, and Gene saw Babe’s dark eyes, doe-soft and aching. There were none of the superficial muscles to give expression; there weren’t even eyelids, but Gene knew that expression. None of the dozen things that came to mind made sense to say, so he did what he was best at: he drew Babe’s forehead to his shoulder and let him hide from the world, and from the pain of his own humiliation. Gene trembled. He didn’t know what from; he only knew he would rip the world apart on Babe’s behalf, and that he would rip himself apart if he disturbed Babe now. He felt the wetness of tears on his shoulder, and the tenderness that overpowered Gene--maybe that’s what made him tremble.

He saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and looked over to see Renée standing there, still in her pajamas and a ratty sweatshirt, her arms wrapped around herself as she watched them. Gene stared at her, stared into her eyes in the way he never did, but he had to; there was too much in him, too many emotions; he had to share them with another before he shivered apart. He knelt on the floor beside a cursed puzzle, the revenant of its victim crying in his arms, and Gene hadn’t felt so present and connected the people around him since the early days of treating, before his mother died, before his exhausted cynicism got the better of him.

“I’m here,” he said, and he didn’t know if it was to Babe, Renée, or himself. For the first time in three years, he was there.


	6. Chapter 6

Eventually, Babe vanished. Whatever allowed him to manifest in the Roe-LeMaire living room was ephemeral at best, and the curse called him to heel before long. When he did, Gene sagged back with an exhausted sigh. Not the exhaustion of active healing, thank Christ, just… exhaustion. He felt like he hadn’t slept at all. He snorted to himself. Hell, maybe he hadn't.

And he was so _cold_. He checked the cordon around his elbow, but it was tied fast, digging into his skin a little. There was a faint but noticeable difference in the color of his skin on one side compared to the other--wrist side, it was pinker. Infected. Possibly septic. He’d have to worry about compartment syndrome if he didn’t get it sorted, soon.

“Okay,” Renée said, her tone brisk, but businesslike. “You are going to eat breakfast. You are going to tell me the details about your grandmother’s arrival, and then you are going to go back to sleep, this time in your own bed rather than the couch. Can you stand?”

“Think so.” Gene was so exhausted he felt sick. Part of that was hunger, he knew, but only part. He leveraged himself upright against the couch cushions. “You’re not gonna ask about--that?”

“Would you tell me, if I did?” she asked, a little waspishly as she went to help him up the rest of the way, propping her shoulder under his arm to support him.

“Dunno what to say.” He concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, and it was a relief when they reached the table and he could brace against the chairback.

Renée’s touch went gentle. “Do you love him?”

Gene had to look away, had to stare fixedly at the tabletop rather than risk the unbridled force of her gaze. He felt so exposed. “Probably.”

“You are such a _man_,” she said, with the deep exasperation he knew all too well from his sister, his mother, his grandmother… yeah.

“We ain’t exactly been giving each other flowers or taking each other out on dates,” he said, a little annoyed. With her, with himself, didn’t matter.

Renée narrowed her eyes at him, before reaching into the fridge and dragging out their eggs and the packet of extra greasy, thick-sliced bacon neither of them had much use for, except for the very few times they were hungover. Or strung out from breaking a curse, it looked like. “Then what _are_ you doing?” she asked. “Because all I see is you putting a puzzle together, but I don’t think that’s it. Not with how you acted just now.”

She looked at him expectantly, and Gene felt like his mother was taking him to task for breaking the china and lying about it. His face heated.

“Oh my god,” she muttered, turning around to rummage for the skillet.

Gene thought about what he wanted to say as she fried up breakfast. By the time she dropped a plate of bacon and eggs in front of him, he felt maybe he could make a start of it.

“We dream together,” he said, staring at his plate. “Every night.”

Renée sat down and shoved a piece of bacon in her mouth. “Nightmares.” Her expression dared him to say otherwise.

“I… Yeah.” Gene’s shoulders hunched in. He picked at the eggs. He needed to eat; the hollow feeling wouldn’t just go away on its own. But the thought of forcing food through the knot in his throat made his stomach roil. “The curse drags out our worst memories and warps them.”

Renée’s expression was simultaneously sympathetic and analyzing. She’d make a good provider, Gene reckoned; she had the knack for it. “Are curses usually this… complicated?”

“No. Every curse is different, but a lot are just accidents. They’re small, go away on their own. This one…” He saw a flash of Babe’s stricken face, stripped of his badges of honor in a hostile Dutch street, in his mind’s eye. “I don’t know how he hasn’t gone insane.”

The clock ticked in the silence between them. Renée had found it; she’d scoured what seemed like every single thrift and consignment shop in the city, even a few of the suburbs, until she’d found one of those old Felix the Cat clocks, with the eyes that went side-to-side along with its tail. She’d laughed and said it was looking for mice.

Renée sighed. It came up from her bones, from a tiredness Gene knew all too well. She held out her hand across the table, palm up. Gene slowly put his over hers, and he was so relieved he could cry.

“Remember when we first met?” she asked.

“You thought I looked like a ‘Michael,’” Gene said with a disgusted scowl. “My glue-sniffing, bait-eating cousin is named Michael.”

“Well, I didn’t _know_ that, did I?” She was smiling at the familiar back-and-forth. Her fingers were tight against his. Gene had always admired her hands; they were soft, but strong. Like she was. He rolled his eyes, like he always did.

The night they’d met, Gene had followed some coworkers to a bar after work, for a lack of anything else to do, and because he’d been terribly lonely. He’d watched from the outside as they did rounds of tequila and shit-talking, and he’d smiled, but it hadn’t touched him. Not much had, then. It had all changed with a hand on his shoulder and a female voice in his ear, high and strained beneath its fake cheer.

“Oh my God, Michael, is that you?”

Gene had turned, completely taken aback, and seen a blonde woman in a bottle green dress with smiley-face earrings, looking at him with a blinding smile and desperation in her eyes.

“It’s me, Renée!” she had said, and Gene, he wasn’t always the quickest when it came to social graces, but he knew a cry for help when he heard one. A professional hazard, you could say.

“Y-yeah,” he said, struggling to catch up. “Renée, how’s it been?” 

She’d gone to the bar to meet her friends, but her ex had gotten there first. She beelined for Gene--somehow singling out the one gay man in the entire bar--to find strength in numbers. Gene didn’t know much about strength, but he thought Renée had more than he ever would, just for the bravery of going up to a strange man and asking for help.

They’d chatted like that for about five minutes, putting up a show of being long-lost acquaintances, and it came so easily that Gene found himself smiling, relaxing even--before a man who looked roughly like the human equivalent of a pick-axe got up and stalked out.

“I’m so sorry,” Renée had said, the act draining away. “Thank you _so_ much, I literally can’t repay you--”

“I’m gay,” Gene blurted out, and of course that was when Jaime had turned around to ask if he wanted some more of that “fruity microbrew bullshit.” They’d taken it a lot better than he’d given them credit for; the worst he got the next day was a round of shit about not knowing what to do with a beautiful woman who came up to him in a bar.

Gene disagreed. He knew exactly what to do with Renée. Three hours of conversation on French painters later, and he’d offered her the spare room in his apartment in return for a third of the rent and half on utilities. That had been two years ago. Renée was almost done with PA school now, and if Gene was being honest, he was dreading it. She was bound for great things; he’d miss her.

“Earth to Gene,” she said in the present, and he came slowly back to himself. Her expression was worried. “You need to eat. You _really_ need to eat, and then maybe… I don’t know, what do you do with a curse like this?”

Gene looked down at the plate of eggs, and suddenly he could picture himself eating it without barfing it all out again. He started inhaling bacon with a vengeance. “Sleep, mostly,” he said. “Eat and sleep.”

“Good thing you made that vat of soup, then,” she said with a cautious smile. “It’s really good, did your grandmother teach you?”

“My mama,” Gene said quietly. “And my uncle, but he was more about the boucherie.”

“You know how to butcher animals?” Renée asked incredulously.

“Well… yeah,” Gene replied. “It’s like a family tradition. Fatten up a hog every year and bring the family together to butcher it.”

“You really _are_ a redneck,” she said in wonderment. “No, you really are, do you chase greased piglets too? Shoot soda cans off the back porch? Wrestle alligators for fun?”

“Sometimes,” Gene said with a creaky-feeling smile. “It’s a chicken, though, not a piglet. And alligators are good eating.”

“Oh my _god_! Eugene Roe, tell me you haven’t eaten alligator!”

“What, like you ain’t never gone and ate those overpriced mall cinnamon rolls with your mama after buying eight-thousand dollar handbags, huh?

“It was _three hundred_ dollars, and it was _once_.”

“Fell apart in a week,” he said, shovelling in the last of his eggs and giving serious consideration to just picking up the plate and licking it clean.

“And I never made that mistake again,” Renée replied. “But you’ve still eaten alligator.”

“Better them than me,” Gene replied. “Pretty sure I’d eat the couch right about now, if I could figure out how to make it fit.”

“It’d probably do you good. A little sauce espagnole might cut the mustiness. Make it go down easier.”

Gene snorted a startled laugh. 

They didn’t eat the couch. Instead, they sat on it side-by-side, watching old Adventure Time episodes with a giant bowl of popcorn. Renée had tea; she’d made Gene drink a glass of the full-fat eggnog she’d been hoarding in the back of the fridge. He’d bitched and moaned at first--he wasn’t much of an eggnog fan, he’d rather just have the bourbon--but he’d downed the entire glass almost by accident, so he meekly submitted to a second.

“I worked on a shrimp boat for a couple years,” he said over baby Finn shaking his can. “The boat was always falling apart, s’how I learned to weld.”

“You are a stereotype,” Renée said through a mouthful of popcorn. “Did you get into the business with your good friend Forrest?”

“Nah, he was the next bay over from me.”

“Rats.” She tossed a few kernels to Piggy, who was balled up hopefully on the floor. “I had to learn CPR in my high school health class. That’s when I realized I wanted to go into medicine. My mother wanted me to be a doctor, but I didn’t want those school loans over my head. There’s a little more freedom as a mid-level.”

“Gonna be a hotshot PA in Chestnut Hill, huh?” He said it with a smile, to hide how much he wanted her to stay.

She shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know, I’m keeping my options open.”

Gene took a handful of popcorn. He wasn’t _trying_ to confess every painful thing that had happened to him, exactly, but he figured… why not? He was Catholic, after all. “My mother died,” he said, tossing a couple more kernels to Piggy before shoving the rest in his mouth. “Four years ago.”

“I’m so sorry,” Renée said. “How? If you don’t mind sharing.”

“Cancer.” Gene raised his glass and snorted into his eggnog. “Whole family of healers and not a Goddamn one of us could heal her.” He scowled at the television. “God wanted her back, I guess. My papa ran back to the oil rig as soon as we got her ashes.”

“I’m sorry,” Renée said again. “My grandfather died of mouth cancer. It wasn’t… they kept cutting away pieces of his jaw.”

Gene took her hand. They just sat there on the couch, holding hands, being maudlin together.

“I killed my cousin,” he finally said, for the second time in three years. “Or good as. Too drunk to heal her right. So she died.”

Renée’s fingers tightened around his, enough that it hurt, but she didn’t say it wasn’t his fault. Gene was glad for that. He stared fixedly at the television screen he wasn’t really seeing.

“Okay, I can’t beat that,” Renée said with a sigh. “All I’ve got is a crazy ex-boyfriend.”

Gene laughed, half-choked with swallowed-back tears and genuine love. “Hey, he did one good thing, at least.”

“Mm?”

He shook their clasped hands. “Reconnected you with your good friend Michael.”

“Oh my God,” she said, and slapped him on the shoulder. “Jerk.”

Eventually, they switched to a random nature documentary on owls.

“What are you gonna do when you break the curse?” Renée asked, tilting her foot downward, toward the puzzle still laid out on the coffee table she had her heels propped up on.

“No idea. Play it by ear, I guess.”

“Hm. I guess it is rather hard to plan for Captain America bursting to life in your living room.”

“He’s enlisted,” Gene said with a small, wry smile. “Private America, reporting for duty.”

“Title of your sextape!” Renée gasped, scattering popcorn everywhere. 

“Alright, alright,” Gene said over her laughter. “Jesus.” He felt like two weeks of flu and a tumble down the stairs, but it didn’t seem to matter as much, anymore. He’d get through it. He’d get Babe through it.

***

“Gene,” a voice said quietly. “Gene, wake up.”

Gene let out a low whine of displeasure and forced his eyes open. Renée was leaning over him, shaking him awake from where he'd passed out on the couch, a technical manual open on his chest. The sun had set since last he'd been awake.

“Time’sit?” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.

“Almost 5:30,” Renée answered. “I’m heading out to meet Anna, she doesn't believe you haven't killed me yet.”

Gene scowled at her; she just smiled crookedly. “I wasn't exactly in a good way when I left,” she said. “Don't know how I’ll explain this, but… I don't know, I’ll think of something.”

Gene looked over at the puzzle. It was almost done; two more days to complete it, if the box wasn't lying. it was even uglier, now. The vague patterns and swirls gave the impression of twisted sinews; the way the eye moved over the pattern made it look like pulsing organs. Having seen Babe regrow his from the inside out, Gene had an uncomfortable knowledge of how close the resemblance was.

“I didn't…” Renée twisted her fingers before her. “I didn't want you to wake up and think I’d run away, again.”

“I wouldn't,” Gene countered immediately.

“Still.” Renée stared at him, and Gene stared back. He wasn't used to this much eye contact, but he could see in her eyes what neither of them could squeeze out in words: _You’re important to me. I don’t want to lose you._ Gene had forgotten how good it felt, to be seen as important by another person. Now he was surrounded by it, sleeping and awake.

He cleared his throat. “My grandmother’ll probably be here when you get back. I was going to put her in my room, I’d take the couch, so she doesn't have to get a hotel.”

Renée pressed her lips together, but she didn't say anything. Preparing a counter-attack, for all Gene knew. “I don't like leaving you alone like this,” she said softly.

“M’not gonna die,” Gene said, through teeth clenched so they wouldn't chatter.

“You might,” Renée said pointedly.

“Got the best traiteur in Louisiana coming by.”

Renée sighed. “You shouldn't be doing the puzzle like this.”

“No choice,” Gene replied with a shrug. “If I don't, I _will_ die.”

Renée just stared at him, an awful, sad, torn expression on her face.

“Go,” Gene said as gently as he could. “You being here won’t make a difference.”

She pressed her lips together. “There's sweet tea on the side table. Drink all of it before you do any healing.”

Gene eyed her suspiciously. “When you say sweet tea--”

“Southern-style,” Renée replied, rolling her eyes. “I googled it.”

“‘Kay.” He sank back into the lumpy couch pillow and tried not to feel like he was dying. It was tricky, because he was pretty sure he actually was.

When he looked up again, Renée had already gone, his throat was dry as a bone, and he had to pee so bad his molars were floating.

It was a long, staggering process to get to the bathroom. Gene had to make liberal use of his shoulder against the wall, and he couldn't use his left hand at all--just twisting his wrist too fast sent ugly jolts of pain up his arm. It looked even worse under the bathroom lights: his whole hand was red and swollen, his wrist stiff and tender. Gene blessed God and Jesus and all the saints that he was wearing pajama bottoms with a soft fly instead of heavy jeans. There'd have been no way he'd have gotten himself out, with his hand like this.

Babe was waiting in the living room when he came back out. Gene hadn't even started the puzzle yet, but Babe was there.

“Hey,” he said, making his slow, sickbed way back to the couch. Babe stumped after him, his legs still half-muscled, his movements still uncoordinated. He reached out for Gene’s hand and turned it up so he could see. Gene let him, letting out a small hiss at the pressure. The scratches were dressed and bandaged, Renée had done a better job than he had, but pus and lymph had already soaked the white cotton a sickly yellow-brown. Babe looked up at Gene, and he didn't even have a _face_ but Gene read his expression just fine.

“Yeah, okay,” Gene said, pulling his arm back. “What would I tell the docs, huh? That I got it from a curse, and no thank you, I _can’t_ stay overnight?”

Babe said a very loud nothing.

“I made my choices,” Gene replied, feeling a powerful need to defend himself. “This came with them. You gonna let me work, or you gonna chew me out some more?”

Babe rolled his eyes and went to the other side of the coffee table. Gene sat; Babe, very clumsily, lowered himself to his knees.

Gene drank the damn tea.

The trance came as easily as one breath to the next. Maybe it was the fever; his mind was half-altered already. Didn't matter. Gene sifted through the puzzle pieces--blood-warm to his right hand; cool, dead bone to his left--and fitted the pieces into place.

The pile was noticeably smaller, now. It had seemed insurmountable when he'd first poured it out, and it was still intimidating, but the pieces sat corralled together in the box, and Gene could see the cardboard of the bottom, now, peeking between the remaining pieces like the light at the end of the tunnel.

Babe knelt, watching, patiently waiting. Every so often he would give a shudder; nerves firing as they reconnected, Gene guessed. His rosary dragged across the puzzle, silver on bone, and he watched as muscle materialized and snaked its way up Babe’s arm before fixating over his shoulder capsule. _Biceps brachii_, Gene thought. _Deltoid. Trapezius_. Muscle bloomed as he worked, fleshing out the revenant before him. Covering Babe’s organs, fleshing out his face. Gene placed a piece and completed the image of a tortured, disembodied eye, and Babe blinked his new eyelids. Gene knew the shape of those eyes. He placed a piece against an indeterminate thrusting swirl of red, and Babe held up his hands: just the bony tips remained uncovered. Gene knew those hands; he'd stared at the vessels and tendons crisscrossing their backs for the entire bus ride to Mobile.

He placed pieces and Babe rematerialized, and Gene had never known more truly, more keenly, that healing was an act of love. He loved Edward Heffron, and he felt it with every piece he placed, every shred of his own life that went to restoring Babe’s.

The candle burned low. It was almost at the bottom of the glass now, its flame a starving pool of light. Gene fell deeper in the trance. Night fell. Time passed.

A soft knock came at the door. Babe looked up, and as deeply aware of him as Gene was, he was pulled away from his labors. His fingers faltered on the piece at hand. “S’il te plait?”

Babe nodded and pushed to his feet, his movements smooth with fresh muscle. Gene blinked, the trance wavering. He’d have to get Babe clothes, all his particulars were hanging out. He brushed it from his mind, though, and reached for another piece. The night’s healing wasn’t done.

The trance was still upon him as Babe opened the front door. He heard his grandmother’s exclamation of surprise, and even through the emotional gravity well of being in Mémé Eva’s presence for the first time in three years, he maintained it. He placed a piece. Then another. He turned to look. 

Aunt Irene looked back, and Gene’s sense of God’s love vanished like a popped soap bubble.

“Gene,” she said, her expression blank. “Am I welcome in this house?”

“Tante--” his mouth worked, but that was all that came out. His heart raced up into his throat, shame choked him, humiliation burned through his veins. Then the exhaustion of healing crested like a wave and sucked him down. He knew nothing more.

***

Gene was running. The strain of his muscles, the familiar swing of his arms. The pull and release of his breath. He ran, gravel crunching beneath his shoes, and awareness gradually slipped in through the surge of panic flooding his body.

“Gene! Wait up!”

Sight flickered in like a TV antenna filtering through bad signal. “We’re late!” Gene shouted back, his mouth and throat saying the words without him. The surprise of it was enough to bring him up short, and like that, his body was his own again. He skidded to a halt, and there was Babe, slowing to a jog until he caught up. He was wearing modern clothes again, a white t-shirt and jeans, Converse on his feet.

“Something lit a fire under your ass,” he said. “It was that lady, wasn’t it? I think I remember her, from--” he cut himself off, and his eyes went wide.

“Tante Irene,” Gene said, the old, sick apprehension rising up in his belly. “I don’t--I don’t know why--”

“Hey, hey,” Babe said, batting Gene’s hands aside and grabbing his shoulders. “Breath, okay? Just breathe, in and out.”

Gene did, forcing himself to stop panting, to inhale for five whole, slow seconds before he let it out for another five. “I don’t know why she’s here,” he said.

“Worry about that later,” Babe said, and pressed a kiss against Gene’s forehead.

Gene jerked back to stare at him. Babe looked sheepish. “Yeah, okay, bad idea.”

“No, it was fine,” Gene said. “Just…”

“What?”

Gene licked his lips, moved a little closer into Babe’s space, and felt awkward as a two-legged stool. “Wasn’t expecting it.” His heart was still pounding, but now for different reasons.

“You weren’t expecting it, huh.” Babe moved slowly, and Gene saw the kiss coming a mile away. He was smiling when their lips touched.

It was long and slow as summer heat. Gene’s lips tingled, his body heated, lost in the smell and taste and feeling of Babe so close to him. He scraped his teeth over Babe’s lower lip, just a gentle pinch, and Babe fingers, already slipping under the back of Gene’s shirt, dug into skin as he gasped. “Fuck,” he breathed.

A flock of mourning doves burst out of the undergrowth, startling them back to awareness.

“Shit!” Babe watched them fly off, then looked around. “Where are we, anyway?”

“The Old Place,” Gene said in surprise, finally paying mind to the gravel drive they were making out on. “My grandma lives here.”

Babe glanced around again. “Okay.”

Gene walked past him, taking in the old familiar maples and cypresses lining the drive like--like he was in a dream. “There’s a crawfish bog about a mile that way,” he said, pointing. “I got my finger pinched so badly it left a scar.” He rubbed over the faint white line on his index finger. “We used to pass every Sunday here, head down after church and veiller. Sometimes I’d fall asleep and my papa would carry me out to the car for the drive home.”

They rounded a bend and came across an old station wagon parked cattywampus over the drainage ditch, the last in a line of cars leading out to an open field-turned-parking lot, the crown of a hundred-year-old live oak and a solitary roofline poking above them like atolls in the middle of a Detroit sea.

“Looks like you’re gonna meet the family,” Gene said to Babe.

“Wha--are you serious?” Babe looked down at himself, then back up at Gene in horror. “I can’t meet your family looking like this, Gene! These pants are falling off my ass!”

Gene looked him up and down. The clothes were tighter than his Forties look, but he pulled it off, and they were hardly scandalous. “You look good,” he said.

“Yeah well, I feel half-dressed.”

“You don’t look it.” Gene stepped in close, slipping his fingers in Babe’s front pockets, and leaned in for a kiss. Babe shoved him back a half step.

“The fuck was that?” Gene demanded.

“Sorry,” Babe said, shamefaced. He glanced around them, then back to Gene. “What--what’ll they say about you, y’know, bringing home a man?”

The waver in Babe’s voice brought Gene to heel. Babe was hiding it fairly well, but he was scared.

“Already have,” Gene said. “They all know, they don’t--well, some of them care, but they know better than to make a fuss.”

Babe tugged nervously at his waistband, casting a glance to the rows of cars. “The future, huh?”

Gene leaned back in and gave him a firm kiss. “Rule number two in Acadiana: don’t piss off the traiteurs.”

Babe looked dazed. “What’s rule one?”

“Don’t piss off your mama.”

“Hey, I think we have that rule in South Philly, too.” 

Gene kissed him a little longer, until he felt some of the tension ease out, then he leaned back. “You ready?”

“Six okay,” Babe replied.

“What?”

He shook his head. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

Gene took his hand and led him off the drive and onto the greensward, now covered in every single car his family and a good number of friends and neighbors owned, plus a trailer or three for good measure. Babe held on for dear life.

“If we have a problem, it’ll be the curse’s fault,” Gene said, winding them through the thicket. “The folks welcome to get down at the Old Place ain’t the ones flying the battle flag.” 

“Battle flag?”

“Confederate flag. Civil War.”

Babe looked at him like he'd said the sky was green. “But they lost, why are they flying that flag?”

Gene shrugged. “Lotta people still fighting.” He looked back. “Like Germany, before the Nazis.”

Babe looked deeply unsettled, but before he could say anything, a voice rang out. 

“Eugene! Eugene Roe, you bring that boy inside right now, the boucherie is almost started!”

Gene stopped dead. “Mama,” he said, the word falling numb off his lips.

There she stood on the porch, vibrant and alive, her face flushed like she’d been tending a boiling pot. Her black hair--so much like Gene’s own; he got so much of himself from his mother--was held in its usual messy bun by a crochet hook.

Gene closed his eyes against the pain of it. “Fuck,” was all he could say, and not even Babe’s thumb smoothing over the inside of his wrist soothed him. He opened his eyes and met the soft brown of Babe’s. “Fuck this curse,” he said.

Babe’s face did something complicated, but it settled on a wry almost-smile. “You said it.”

Gene sighed. “Let’s get it over with, huh?”

They made their way toward the house. It was raised up on piers a good three feet off the ground, a massive veranda wrapping around it on all sides, save where the woodpile blocked passage on the west. The roof was tin. Dogs and cats (and occasionally coyotes or skunks, very often raccoons, and once, Gene remembered vividly the time an alligator had gotten stuck by the sewer pipe) slept under the porch. It was the roots of Gene’s childhood, the Old Place, where Verrets and their kin had mingled ever since Gene’s great-great-grandparents built it just before World War Two. 

“Hurry up!” Maud Roe said, beckoning them on. “The hog just got here, we’re waiting on you!”

“The hog?” Babe asked lowly.

“It’s a boucherie,” Gene said, but that clearly didn’t mean shit to Babe. “We butcher a pig and eat it.”

“Oh,” Babe said, and followed Gene up the front steps. “Your family do that often?”

“Once or twice a year, maybe.”

“Huh. I killed a couple backyard chickens, before. Helped dress a deer once in Austria. Never a pig, though.”

“Reckon it’s all the same.” Gene tried to brace himself as they climbed the porch stairs, but his composure blew off like a fart in a hurricane as soon as he saw his mother. She wrapped him in a tight, tight hug, and Gene didn’t know if it was the curse or his own grieving subconscious, but the smell of her perfume--she’d never have worn it to a boucherie, it’d be wasted amid the smell of blood, smoke, and cooking meat, but it curled around Gene, and he was five again, hugging his mama’s leg as she introduced him to his distant cousins, adults from out Belle River way, not Lafayette where he and his parents lived, or Morgan City, where his parents wanted to move. He was eight and she was bringing him back to touch the dog he’d healed from getting hit by a passing Ford Focus, and explaining to him what being a traiteur meant. He was eleven and she was laughing and singing in French as she taught him how to dance in the salle of his childhood house, where Hal lived now, if nothing had changed. He was twenty-one, and his mother had gotten the diagnosis: leukemia, in the advanced stages. All the Verret women had higher risk of anemia; she’d thought it was another bout, not cancer. Her prognosis wasn’t good. When the family healing hadn’t taken, she had refused care and asked for hospice, instead. The room she’d died in had smelled of her perfume and sickness, and Gene’s stomach swooped at the smell of it, now. There was no sickness, though. Just Aunt Janet’s homebrewed eau du rose and the scent of the holy trinity, garlic, and roasted potatoes.

“Mama,” he said, burying his face in her shoulder.

“It’s been ages, Gene, where you been? All the way up North, huh?”

“Yeah, Mama.”

She pushed him back and looked him in the eye. “You’re pining for home, boy. I can see it in the fibers of you.”

Gene just shrugged, unable to get the words out of his throat.

“Oh, my Gene.” She brushed back a strand of his hair, and Gene could have been five again. “Anyway, you gonna introduce your beau, or you gonna forget he’s there at all?”

Gene turned back, surprised, and Babe was there, standing awkwardly with his hands in his pockets. “Sorry,” Gene said, honte to the ground, as his grandmother would have said. “Mama, this is Edward Heffron.”

“Babe,” Babe said. “Nobody but the nuns call me Edward, not even my ma.”

“Babe,” Gene’s mother said, drawing the word out, and Gene ducked his head at the wry expression Babe threw his way.

“Yeah, I can see the resemblance,” Babe said. “No offense, ma’am. But Gene said it the exact same way.”

“Hm,” Gene’s mother said, a small smile on her face. “So, Babe. You were raised Catholic?”

Gene raised his eyes to the heavens. “Mama…”

“I was, yes ma’am,” Babe said, as disgustingly earnest as a choirboy. “Baptised and everything. Irish Catholic, though.”

“That’s better than the last boy Gene brought round. What was he, cher, Baptist?”

“Episcopalian,” Gene mumbled, crossing his arms over his chest.

His mother hissed through her teeth. “Almost as bad as Anglican, and you brought him to the family house.”

“Mama, you _married_\--”

“You hush,” his mother said. “Your daddy may be Anglais, but at least he’s Catholic.”

Babe, listening to this by-play, broke into a broad smile. “Hell, I’ll hate the English whenever you want. No one hates the English like the Irish!”

“The Cajuns might give you a run for your money,” Gene said, heavy with irony.

His mother slapped the back of his head without looking. “Now, Babe,” she said. “Do you cook?”

Gene covered his face with his hands and sat back against the porch rail. “This is a bad dream. _Literally_.”

“I, uh… no?” Babe sounded desperately uncertain. “I can put a sandwich together, make easy stuff like porridge…”

“Mama, you don’t need to _interview_ him, he’s not applying for a _job_\--”

“Eugene Roe, ne me boude pas! You bring someone to a family boucherie and you are making a request he join the family! This _is_ an interview! Now you hush up and let me judge for myself if he’s fit. Babe, did your mama never teach you to take care of yourself?”

“What kind of question is that?” Babe demanded. “‘Course she did. I can mend my own pants and darn my own socks, thank you very much. No call to be learning to cook, though; if my ma ain’t there then one of my sisters is, and if they’re busy then I’m a grown man with my own money and I can buy food at an automat or something.”

Gene glanced between Babe and his mother. Somehow, the conversation had picked up the high stakes tension of the inter-parish poker matches Hal sometimes hosted, and which Gene sometimes sat in on. He clenched his hands into fists against his ribs.

“Hm,” his mother said. “Well, I suppose it was different when you was a child. You’re lucky I’m a forward-thinking woman and taught my son to make a roux. You won’t go hungry, if you stick around. You gonna stick around, Babe?”

Babe glanced to Gene, and Gene smiled awkwardly. Oh, God, he was honte all the way down to the fucking ground. He’d never speak ill of his mother, rest her soul, but he was thinking a thing or two as loudly as possible.

“Yeah,” Babe finally said. “Yeah, I think I’d like that.”

Heat burst through Gene’s chest, filling him up like sunshine. He stared at Babe, and Babe stared back, and Gene was aware of the idiot smile on his own face, but he couldn't figure out how to switch it off. Babe’s smile didn’t look half as sappy. No, it looked like home.

“Mais,” Gene’s mother said softly. “Like that, huh.”

They gave each other calf eyes for a bit longer, until Babe cleared his throat and looked away, breaking the moment. “So,” he said. “What's this again? A--a boosheddy?”

Gene snorted. “_Boucherie_,” he corrected.

“You could call it a hog slaughter, I suppose,” Gene’s mother said, “But that don't really catch the full weight of the event. Come on back, they're waiting.”

She led them back through the house of Gene’s childhood. His parents had moved a lot; they’d met in Baton Rouge, and Gene’s earliest memories were of the apartment they’d lived in before his paternal grandparents’ largesse had waned. The only constant was Mémé and Papère’s house, out in the Atchafalaya boondocks.

It still looked the same. Gene figured the curse was drawing from his memories rather than anything true or real, but it was a balm as much as a hurt, to walk through his grandmother’s salle and see all the crocheted cozies and afghans cluttering up the scene. Or to walk through her kitchen and see the empty phone jack on the wall, with the stool and pad of paper sat beside it like they always had been, only with a cell phone charger instead of a landline. It smelled like beignets, bacon, and stinging nostalgia.

Babe whistled lowly. “This what modern kitchens look like?”

“Not that modern,” Gene replied. “Think they overhauled it in the Seventies.”

“Ain’t even a bathtub by the sink,” Babe said, looking around, and Gene was _pretty_ sure he was joking.

Gene’s mama led them out onto the back porch, and there was a whole new blow of nostalgia: the sight of rows and rows of folding tables and picnic benches, hauled out and set up for the Verret clan and their friends to meet and make pork. There was the slaughtering station over down by the outdoor spigot, for easier cleaning; on the other side, the musicians were already set up under the tree: Richie on his upright bass, Sal, Maggie, and Ace on fiddles, Cousin Chuck and Peter LeRoy with their guitars, and Lemarr Jackson with his mother-of-pearl-inlaid accordion. No one seemed to care that CCR was playing on the radio perched on the porch rail, too--not the folks veillent over the tables, and not the bouchers inspecting the tools of their trade and swapping tips. Gene wondered who would be doing the honors. Traditionally, his Papère Michel had done so, but the stroke had made his fine motor control too unreliable to trust for a clean, merciful killing. Usually now it was one of Gene’s uncles, or one of the cousins that wanted to learn the trade, but not many did; Gene knew he didn’t.

It was then that Gene realized there wasn’t a pig to be seen.

“Hey, where--” he turned to look for his mother, but she was gone, too. A chill ran down Gene’s spine. He shared a glance with Babe. There was always a twist to these dreams, where things went from normal--pleasant, even--to dark and hurtful. Gene thought they might have found the twist, now. He looked back at the crowd, and he started.

They were all staring at him.

“There he is,” Uncle Uli said, his tone light. “Long time no see, Gene.”

“Yeah,” Gene said, apprehension building in his stomach. “Been away, figuring things out.”

“Been away too long,” Cousin Sal hollered from out by the music tree, her fiddle tucked under her arm. “Glad to see you back, boy.”

Gene nodded awkwardly. There was a target on him, but he couldn't yet see where. He knew _why_, though. Mais ya, he knew, didn't he.

“Why don't you come on down here,” Uli said. “Got some people for you to meet.”

Gene slowly started down the back stairs, Babe silent at his back. A few folks turned away to their drinks, or to say something to their companions, but the attention of the group as a whole stayed fixed on Gene. And Gene, he’d never been a showboater, not like his sister who was off doing theater in New Orleans; he didn't hate attention, but he didn't go looking for it either, and this? This was not any kind of attention he wanted to have. This ugly, sullen anger was why he'd run for three days straight.

“Over this way,” Uli said, pushing off from the table he'd been leaning against. He’d started walking toward the slaughter station when two things happened almost at once.

First, a scuffle kicked off behind Gene. He glanced back, and Hal was there, along with Mike and Scooter, wrestling Babe back. Gene couldn't even process it, too stunned by the first sight of his brother in three years to register that he'd slapped a hand over Babe’s mouth. 

Second, Uli barked a sharp “Gene!” that drew back his attention, and Gene saw Nonc Eduard standing by the long table of knives, holding the bolt gun in his folded arms. He was, like everyone else, staring at Gene--though his face was carved in anguish, not disgust.

He remembered abruptly that Eduard had done a stint at a slaughterhouse near Thibodeaux. He had never, not once, offered to go near the slaughter station, and no one had ever been stupid enough to ask him to.

“Nonc Eduard?” he said, through a waver of uncertainty.

“First rights to the injured party,” Uli said, like he did before one of the bareknuckle fist fights all the family pretended not to know about. “I’m real sorry, Gene.”

That's when Gene saw Irene, her face like a stone, the heart knife pressed inconspicuously against her leg.

Gene stiffened as realization hit. He licked his lips. “My turn, huh?”

Babe broke loose from his captors. “Gene, get outta there!” Hal swore and wrestled him back under control. Gene took a step toward them to help, but he wasn't really sure who.

“Gene.” Nonc Eduard’s voice, soft and deep, and Gene froze in his tracks. He may love Babe, love his brother, but he owed a debt that ran deeper than both. He met Eduard’s gaze and found he couldn't keep it; he dropped his eyes to the hard-packed dirt. His shame was twice as deep as the Gulf was wide.

“You didn't think we’d forgive you?” Eduard asked, and there was nothing but sorrow in the words.

“I--” Gene’s throat closed, and he shook his head. He’d hoped, but… no. He hadn’t actually expected they’d forgive him. “What do you want?” he forced out. Everything he had was theirs. He'd give anything.

Eduard held out the bolt gun.

The boucherie was silent as a tomb. “Come and take my hand,” John Fogerty sang, untended on the radio.

There it was. Gene let out a shaky sigh, strangely calm. He'd known it was coming; it had been breathing down his neck for three years straight. And here, the levy broke. It was almost a relief.

“A life for a life,” Eduard said. “The Lord will judge you, Eugene Roe.”

Gene looked up at him, and after the tiniest hesitation, he took the gun.

Babe started screaming against the hands that held him. Gene ignored the ruckus as his family tried to subdue him; he was in a different plane altogether. The gun gleamed in the late February sunlight.

“What if I miss?” he asked, suddenly afraid. He’d never seen it happen himself, but he’d heard stories of badly-aimed bolts.

“I’ll make it quick,” Irene said, her eyes blazing. It was a strange sort of comfort, seeing that long knife in her hand. If he somehow botched the job, she’d be there, slicing down through his neck and into his heart. Gene couldn't feel his legs, but he locked his knees to keep from falling over.

Would they use him to make boudin? Body and blood, like Christ. Except Gene was dying for his own sins. He raised the gun with a trembling hand and placed it against his temple.

“_Gene_! It’s a--let me _go_! It’s a curse, stop!”

He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.


	7. Chapter 7

He floated in darkness. It was quiet. Peaceful. The dread of the past week was gone; his ever-present guilt had fled, leaving only this floating awareness and a sense of closure. Finished or not, it was done.

Gene was dead. There was no question. He had pulled the trigger, and now he was gone. He wondered in a vague, non-urgent way how it was he could think at all, after having inflicted severe brain trauma on himself.

“Eugene,” his mother said. “Look.” Gene didn't stop to question her presence; he simply did as she bid, and the room slipped into focus.

He was in his and Renée’s grungy little Philadelphia apartment, hovering in the same corner of the living room where Babe’s revenant manifested. He looked, without alarm, upon his body where it lay slack against the couch cushions. Someone had covered him in a crochet afghan.

“Not yet,” he heard a voice say. “Not _yet_, Gene, so help me God.”

It was Babe. He stood over Gene’s body, wearing a pair of Renée’s pajama pants and an old, stretched-out LSU shirt Gene had bummed off Hal, but he was looking straight up into the corner where _Gene_ was, looking him in the eye.

He glowed faintly. A malignant, suppurant aura, clinging to him and trailing after when he moved. Gene had never Seen a curse before. He watched from an emotional remove as Babe tried to grab him--he reached out with fully-fleshed hands, not a revenant in this in-between place--but they passed right through Gene’s soul-substance. Gene didn't even feel it.

“No,” Babe whispered. “_No_. No one else!” He yelled at the ceiling.

“Babe?” Mémé Eva asked from where she was sitting in Renée’s comfy chair. “Was that you?”

Babe immediately went back to Gene’s body and pointed at it. He made a heartbeat pattern on his chest, then stopped it. No heartbeat.

“No!” Gene’s grandmother cast aside the yarn in her lap and raced to Gene’s deathbed. “No, it isn’t your time, it can’t be! Irene, I need you!”

Irene’s voice came a few moments later, from the bathroom. “I’m a little busy!”

“Je m’en fiche! C’est Eugène!”

Irene swore. Mémé Eva dipped her fingers into the pitcher on the end table--holy water, freshly blessed. It glowed, too, but unlike Babe, it was wholesome and clean. Mémé Eva sprinkled it around the couch, muttering traiteur’s prayers in frantic French. “Oh Lord, watch over Your son, but I beg You, spare his life. _Irene_!”

“I’m _coming_, Mama, hold on!”

Renée edged around the corner, her arms folded nervously across her chest. “What's going on?”

“Eugène is passing,” Mémé Eva said. “Whatever you do, chère, you don't call the ambulance, you hear? They won't help him none.”

“Okay.” Renée’s eyes were wide and worried as Irene barreled past, buttoning up her trousers.

“Qu'est-ce qu'il se passe?”

Mémé Eva shifted over to make room for her by the couch. “La mort est ici. Donne-moi l’huile, vite!”

“Putain!” Irene laid her hands over Gene’s still chest. “We need to have words, you and I, you better not run away again or so help me--”

“Chère, pas maintenant. The oil, if you please!” Mémé Eva brushed holy water over Gene’s brow, and he felt it in spirit, too: a cool balm against his soul. 

How he loved his family. It was so pure and powerful it was almost tangible: love like nothing he'd ever known. All their frailties, their virtues, their quirks of humanity; everything that had ever made him laugh or cry, he loved them for it. It poured into him, such a torrent he couldn't possibly have contained it all--but he wasn't in a body any longer, and there were no bounds on what he could feel. He radiated his love for them, a red dwarf beating back the dark, and he only wished he could have left them with fewer regrets. No matter. His mother stood in a wash of light where the kitchen used to be, and peace was beckoning.

His grandmother and aunt began to sing a psalm. Gene stopped, his attention caught. It had been his favorite, as a boy; he'd used to sing it while throwing rocks into the frog pond in the field behind the house. 

“Gene, please,” Babe whispered, his voice cracking. 

In the other direction, his mother waited, as young and fresh-faced as she looked in her wedding photos. She, too, radiated love--so strongly that it drowned Gene out; the star cluster at the center of the galaxy. 

He had a choice to make.

With the clarity of death, he saw how he had shied away from his healer’s calling. How he had chosen to cut himself off from those around him, and called it objective truth. He saw also the joy he had brought: Renée’s relief at finding a place to stay with someone she trusted; Babe’s painful hope; even a memory of pushing through his still-fresh grief to teach Thomasine how to throw a baseball. She had healed him that day, just a little, though neither had known it at the time. Gene wished with a deep and aching sorrow that he could have returned the favor.

He saw a glimpse of a possible future: working beside his friend during the days, and coming home to his husband for the quiet nights. He saw a glimpse of the hurt he would suffer, as all suffered during life; he saw also, a glimpse of the peace he would find. 

“It won't be as long as you think,” his mother said gently. “But either comes with a cost.”

Gene gazed upon his mother with a sharp envie. Four years, he had missed her. Missed her so badly he thought he would die of it, and now she was here. Only a choice away.

But what of Renée and Babe?

Renée would be alright. She had friends, family. She had her people to lean on. She'd have a rough couple of months, but she'd bounce back; she was resilient, and this was her time and place.

But Babe? He had nothing but Gene and whatever remnants of his family had survived for seventy years. Traitement was not over when the acute injury was gone; a proper healing made sure the patient thrived afterwards. If Gene stayed, he would have the traiteur’s duty returned to him tenfold.

Go, and leave pain behind. Stay, and reclaim his duty.

Babe looked up at him, his eyes dark and pleading, and Gene felt it again: the soft tug that had drawn him through the stacks of a Philadelphia used bookstore to the puzzle hiding in the back. Now, like then, he realized he’d already made his choice.

Eugene Roe was a traiteur, son of the strongest line unbroken all the way to Acadie, if not to France herself. It wasn’t in him to betray that trust.

He turned to his mother, but there was no need to explain. She knew, and she understood. “I’ll be waiting,” she said. “It’ll happen so fast, cher, enjoy it while you can.”

“Mama,” he said, but didn’t say more, because it wasn't needed. She knew.

“He’s a good man. Love him well, Gene. I’ll be waiting.”

Gene heard the sound of wind blowing, slowly rising until it eclipsed everything. He held fast for a moment, afraid; but then a still, small voice said to him, in the inner reaches of his soul: _let go_. Gene did. It was just like jumping out of an airplane. He thought of the Irish prayer: he was in the palm of God’s hand; he would not fall.

***

His first breath was fire in his chest. Sensation flooded in, one assault after another: his limbs were lead; his head throbbed; the lights overhead smeared across his vision, heaving his stomach. He couldn't _breathe_\--

“--back! Mama, he’s back, oh God--”

“Don't stop praying! Renée, fetch a mixing bowl or trash can, right away, ma chère!”

Every heartbeat was a gunshot in Gene’s breast, and each one ricocheted against the inside of his skull. He couldn’t move for the shock of it.

“Eugène, you have to breathe, mon petit-fils!”

“--le Seigneur est avec, vous; vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes, et Jésus le--”

He gasped another breath, the heat of healing burning through his veins. Not this, the gentle hand of God; this was adrenaline to the heart. This was resurrection.

“Please,” he heard Renée say near his head. “Don’t take him, yet.”

Gene tried to say her name, but he couldn’t shape his thoughts around the word. His head was a massive swell of pain, crushing down on his spine. He thought he might have made a sound; his throat vibrated like it had.

“Hush, mon Eugène, the work isn’t done.” Fingers traced a cross in oil upon his brow, then upon each of his hands and feet. “Behold, how we love him, Lord! Thou art the resurrection and the life, so we believe; show us now thy Glory!”

Shivers wracked through him, but he was sweating; his soul cried for the stillness and peace of death. He had never been more aware of the agony of incarnation. He cracked his eyes open, and his vision swam. He gagged.

“Turn him on his side, quick!”

He felt hands haul him up sideways, in time for him to vomit up bile and blood. He must have bitten his tongue. He almost passed out from the pain of it. A cool hand pressed against his brow. “Let you be gone from sorrow and hurt, and dwell in the love of God.”

_I was,_ he thought. _Let me go back_.

Another hand slipped under his shirt and traced a cross over his side, and then again, to trace a much larger one across his back. His shirt clung to his skin with sweat, he was chilled with it, but the oil grew warmer and warmer until it blazed against his skin like brands. He felt himself cry out.

“God returned you to us, Eugène, so you’re staying! Now hush and let us heal your hurts!”

Gene wasn’t sure if it was tears or sweat that ran down his face. _Please_, he cried out into the void.

_Tu es Mon traiteur_, the voice in his heart replied. _Tu es l'œuvre de Ma main._

_Non, please, je vous en supplie! It hurts!_

_Lève-toi, traiteur._

The crosses blazed heat through his body, along all of his nerves, surging up to his head. With the clarity of the universe in the space of a second, Gene witnessed his curse-damaged neurons re-linking before his inner eye. Myelin smoothed over; dendrites reached out; axons reattached themselves, one by one. They retained their scars--not all pathways could be renewed, and Gene saw, in the multidimensional sight of God, that he would have migraines in the future, after periods of great stress. But he would live. He would not suffer a catastrophic brain hemorrhage and bleed out on his living room couch because a malicious curse was loath to release its victim.

The fire quenched. Time shrank until Gene was only himself, a human soul in a human body. His muscles went slack from the blessed release from pain. The silence was astounding.

“Gene?”

He opened his eyes. Renée was there, white-faced and perched near his head. He stared at her for a while, feeling like bug guts on a train’s front grill. Babe stood behind her, once again reduced to bare muscle. The curse must be losing its strength, if he was still around so long after the working. His expression--he had an actual expression, now that his superficial muscles had been fleshed in--was tense. Gene filled his eyes with him, then looked away, to where his grandmother and aunt were kneeling, breathless and disheveled.

“Merci,” he said weakly. Barely more than a sigh of exhaustion.

“Always,” his grandmother said. “Always, mon Eugène.”

Renée laid a hand on his shoulder. “He needs a hospital.”

“Probably,” Aunt Irene said. “You wanna explain this to them?”

If Renée said something in reply, Gene didn’t hear it. He was already asleep.

***

The apartment was quiet when he woke. Gene lay there for a time, drifting. He was still on the couch, which had been properly made up: he was bundled in every spare blanket and comforter in the apartment. All his muscles ached; all his joints felt tender. His temples pounded, but felt clear-headed despite; the fever must have broken. He was okay, for given values of okay. The curse wasn’t done, but he was okay. He opened his eyes.

Late morning sunlight poured in through the windows, pale with the cold clarity of winter, and Babe was sitting on the floor by the TV, sorting through Renée’s DVD collection.

“Hey, Babe,” Gene said through a cracked throat.

Babe looked up and smiled at him. He set aside the case he was holding and went to kneel by the couch, laying a hand on the covers over Gene’s chest. There was something far more surreal about seeing a flayed man sitting on the living room floor in borrowed clothes than him standing fully naked in an aura of curse magic. Gene didn’t bother himself thinking about it. He just pushed himself up with shaking arms and Babe’s steady help, until he was sitting back against the arm of the couch. He just stared at Babe, at the bare lines of muscle and white sheets of fascia, and the places where the bone and cartilage showed through. He looked like an anatomy textbook. He looked like Babe.

“You saved my life,” Gene said.

The muscles around Babe’s mouth contracted; his lips pinched. It was surreal and fascinating to see it, like this. Babe didn’t say anything, though. He just squeezed Gene’s arm. Gene wondered why Babe didn’t talk. It must have been the curse; he should have regrown all the parts, by now, save maybe a mucus membrane or two.

“Thank you.” He laid his hand over Babe’s, and he only felt skin. “For sounding the alarm.”

Babe ducked away. He shook his bare, muscled head, a despairing, denying gesture; Gene wasn’t sure what he was saying. His bony fingers squeezed Gene’s arm. His lips moved, but nothing came out, and Gene thought that, maybe, whatever he was saying was to himself and not Gene. He broke both their grips and laid his hand over Gene’s chest, feeling his heartbeat.

“Yeah,” Gene said, feeling helpless and in love. “I’m here.”

Babe looked up at him, his wide mouth turned down in a sad, trembling expression.

“I’m here,” Gene said again, putting a little more force behind it. “I made a promise, didn’t I? We’re getting you out of that curse, Babe Heffron, if it fucking kills me.”

_That_ pissed Babe off. He flicked Gene right between the eyes, and Gene jerked back, disoriented.

“Alright,” he said, abashed. “Sorry.”

Babe glared at him a little longer for good measure, before reaching for Gene’s hand. He took it carefully, like Gene was something precious and fragile, and spread it out, palm up, over the covers. He rubbed his thumb down Gene’s life line. It occurred to Gene that he’d touched every part of Babe’s body, or would soon, when he finished the puzzle. Gene could only gaze up at him, his heart in his eyes and his words in a useless jumble at his feet. What a crazy story this would be to tell, when he was old and gray. Hopefully, Babe would be there with him.

“Excuse me, Babe,” another voice said, and Gene’s peace was shattered. Babe reluctantly backed up to make room for Aunt Irene.

“Let me see your wrist,” she said, and after a moment’s hesitation, Gene offered it. The bandages were old, the tape peeling at the edges and crusty brown stains dried into the cotton. His entire body was locked with nerves. He barely winced at the pull of the tape against his arm hairs.

“Good, it’s healing well.”

Gene hazarded a glance, and to his relief, it really was. The red streaks had retreated back to the wounds, which were still red and oozing, but the infection was on its back foot. He let her wash away the pus and dried lymph, but when he felt the unnatural heat of Healing, he had to turn away. He was trembling with how tightly he was holding himself. Irene taped down a new bandage, then sat back on her heels.

The silence between them stretched. Gene had had nightmares about this conversation, a fucking curse had tormented him with it. Now, it was finally happening. He waited for the hammer to fall.

“I shouldn’t have said what I did,” Irene said.

Gene didn’t move a muscle.

She sighed. “I should have gone to the hospital. I should have known better than to try and make you do the impossible, and it was unfair of me to expect you to be at my beck and call. I’m sorry.”

None of that squared with what Gene knew. He finally looked up at Irene, feeling wary as an alley cat toward an outstretched hand.

Her expression was fixed, a little pinched around the mouth. She looked older, more wrinkles on the brow, more gray in her hair. “My daughter died, and it wasn’t your fault,” she said, sounding like the admission was being dragged out of her all unwilling. “I want it to be, don’t mistake me, but it’s been three years now, and I can’t keep telling myself stories just because they hurt less than the hard truth that I made bad choices.”

Gene shook his head. “No. I--I should have been there, I was--I shouldn’t have been drinking--”

“Gene, you were _twenty-two_ and you’d just lost your mama a year before.”

Gene’s whole body quaked with a spasm of emotion. He tried to keep the tears back, but his eyes were already stinging, so he tried to ignore them, instead. He ducked his head in some vain hope Irene wouldn’t see.

She sighed again, deeper and with more regret. “I’m sorry.” She placed a hand on his back, and Gene lurched forward, unable to let himself accept the comfort. It was silly. He was an adult; he could accept her apology, she clearly meant it, and she wasn’t even wrong; the rational part of Gene’s brain had said as much more than once.

But the emotional part of Gene’s was stronger, and it knew he was a shame to the family. That he didn’t deserve forgiveness. He saw Thomasine’s face as she dragged him over to see the lettuce plants she’d grown. Him, patiently letting her practice her traiteuring on the thumb he’d smashed with a hammer. She hadn’t manifested strongly, but that didn’t mean much, if a skill was practiced enough. Uncle Uli was the one doing most of the teaching; Gene was the cool cousin, though, and she hero-worshipped him in a way that alternately pleased and embarrassed him. Her making him learn how to braid Black hair, a bossy, loud-mouthed twelve-year-old, to keep his mind off his mother’s sickness. She had been full of laughter and joie.

And he’d let her die.

He hunched over his knees and he cried, and Aunt Irene rubbed his back, and Gene was so tired of feeling everything. He’d just fucking died, but he’d gotten a second chance where his cousin hadn’t, and he was tired. He wasn’t worth this; he couldn’t see what was better about him than Thomasine.

“I’m sorry,” he blubbered out.

“I know,” Irene replied. “I am too.”

He cried for all the things he couldn’t fix, and for the shame of it, and for the futures Thomasine and his mother would never have. And when he’d cried himself out, he slept.

***

He slept for most of that day. He woke occasionally to the sound of voices raised in the kitchen, or to the sound of the washing machine going, or something exploding spectacularly on TV. His house was full of people; it was good. Once or twice Renée or his grandmother woke him to shove some food or sweet tea down his throat; he didn't have a clear memory of those.

What he remembered: Babe watching _Finding Nemo_ with a rapt expression, sitting on the floor with his arms around his knees. Irene and Renée singing “Frère Jacques” as they peeled potatoes. Mémé Eva talking quietly with Babe, who towered over her tiny, gray-haired frame, and Gene’s half-awake mind thought of Old Woman Josie, keeping angels company out by the Night Vale used car lot. Renée sitting against him on the couch to watch an episode of her awful show, her notes on drug interactions scattered over the floor and Gene’s shins. He curled around her like a comma and went back to sleep, her irregular movements peaceful and homey.

Sometime between one eyeblink and another, dusk fell. Gene’s nose woke him, to the scent of onions and piment. He pushed himself up, feeling muzzy-headed and uncoordinated. Babe, leaning against the kitchen doorway, knocked his knuckles against the wall to catch everyone’s attention. He nodded toward Gene.

“What’s cooking?” Gene asked, rubbing at his eyes.

“Something called étouffée,” Renée answered from the kitchen table, where she and her notes had migrated.

“Fortification for the night’s working,” Mémé Eva said, bustling over with a large bowl. “Now you eat all that, Eugène. All, you hear?”

‘Yes, Mémé.” It was one of the fancy, large-size ramen bowls he’d found in a thrift shop, easily larger than his own head, filled with rice and shrimp and his grandmother’s cornbread. Gene’s stomach growled loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Lord, he could smell the cayenne. He was two bites in before he gave it a second thought.

“I don’t know how you can eat that,” Renée said. “I was sweating after one bite.”

“We’re reared to it young,” Irene answered, where she was mixing something Gene couldn’t see from the couch.

“It’s in the milk,” Mémé Eva said with all authority. “A babe gets its first taste of cayenne from the breast.”

“You’d think it’d be through the placenta,” Gene said.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” his grandmother said, swatting his thigh. “And everybody knows cayenne doesn’t pass the placental barrier.”

Gene almost snorted rice up his nose, but he caught himself in time.

Then it was time for the night’s healing. The last healing. Gene could barely keep himself awake, even with all the sleep he’d had; a gnawing pit sat in his belly, even though he didn’t think he could actually wedge more food into his stomach.

“Yeah, hold on,” he said to his grandmother’s fussing, his head propped up on his hand. He stared at his mother’s rosary where it dangled against his wrist and took slow, deep breaths.

“We’re here,” Mémé Eva said. “We will pray with you, Eugène.”

“You’re not alone,” Irene added.

Gene looked up, to where Babe sat on the other side of the coffee table, and where Renée sat by his grandmother. They all looked to him.

“Okay,” he said, and reached for the seven-day candle. His grandmother and aunt each put a hand on his shoulders; a faint trickle of Holy warmth filled him; not a Healing, not yet, but the anticipation of it was there. He fumbled the matches, trying not to burn his fingers as he shoved the match down the skinny jar. The flame barely reached the wick, but it caught. He set the candle aside, and the trance fell light as a winter’s snow.

There wasn’t much left to the puzzle. Gene had done the math, and it came out to around 2,500 pieces a day for him to meet the seven-day deadline. It sounded like a lot, but there was only a small patch of coffee table peeping through the almost-finished puzzle. The swirls were even more nauseating now, in full size rendering. Gene paid them no mind. He reached for a puzzle piece, and then reached for another, and another, and he laid them down one by one, a steady spiral inward.

It was hard. It was the hardest healing he had ever done. It was rock climbing El Capitan twice in a row. It was running a marathon without water. He had to say the prayers aloud or he’d forget his way, but he forgot his way anyhow, his concentration was that bad. If it hadn’t been for his grandmother and aunt at his back, filling him with light and saying the words along with him, he’d have lost his grip on the trance a dozen times over. His fingers shook, and his hands hesitated.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the striated red of Babe’s bare muscle occlude into pale skin. Gene didn’t dare look. Sweat dripped down his brow; his arms shook, and he reached for another piece.

He was nodding by the time he reached the final pieces. He was leaning against Irene, and Mémé Eva had a hand against his chest to keep him from falling forward onto the coffee table.

“Come on, Gene,” he heard Renée whispering. “Come on, you can do it. Almost there.”

The Holy light of healing was indistinguishable from the rushing in his ears. His vision narrowed down to the work of his hands.

Then he laid the last piece, and there were no more left. He drew in a shaking breath.

At first, nothing happened. But then, like a burning photograph, the edges of the puzzle started charring inwards, consuming the twisted, tortured image and baring Babe’s service photo, pristine and larger than life across the coffee table. Then it vanished like the revenant, a slow fade from reality.

Gene looked up, rocked by a sudden fear, but Babe was still there, still kneeling on the other side of the coffee table and dressed in a ratty LSU shirt with a hole in the collar and flannel pajama bottoms with moose all over them, but he was fully fleshed, freckles dark against the flush riding high on his cheeks.

“Gene,” he said in a voice dry with disuse.

That was all Gene remembered. 

***

On the seventh night, Gene slept. He did not dream.


	8. Chapter 8

Awareness came in slowly, a gentle resurrection. His limbs were heavy, he was warm and cocooned. Sleep dragged at his thoughts. He let himself drift; he felt no urgency, only a sense of completion and deserved rest. He basked in it, not questioning why or how. When the urge came, he opened his eyes.

Babe was lying opposite him, asleep. Late afternoon sunlight poured into Gene’s bedroom, burnishing the copper of Babe’s hair, limning the stubble that dusted his jaw. Gene drank him in, safe in the knowledge that the curse wouldn’t take this moment away. Freckles were scattered over Babe’s cheeks, and he still had that bruise under his fingernail. He was lying overtop the covers, rather than under them; he was wearing jeans and a Captain America t-shirt. Gene blinked slowly against a smile. He’d get Renée for that. 

The apartment was quiet. Their neighbors were quiet. Gene supposed Renée was at classes; he didn’t know where his grandmother or Aunt Irene were. It didn’t strike him as very important, not with Babe Heffron in his bed, clearly fallen asleep waiting for him to wake up.

Babe’s eyes opened. The sunlight was hitting them just so, faint streaks of green and gold showing out through the brown. Gene’s breath caught.

“Hey,” he said lowly.

Babe broke into a soft smile. “Hay is for horses.”

Gene stared at him for a moment, then turned and groaned into his pillow. “_Asshole_.”

“Eh, you’re just an easy mark.”

Gene couldn’t stop smiling. He just looked at Babe like the world’s biggest dope and smiled from all the happiness forcing its way out of him. “You’re lucky you’re pretty, Heffron.”

Babe’s smile broadened. “Oh, Eu_gene_, d’you really mean it? You say the nicest things!”

Gene dragged his arm out of the covers to smack him, but Babe blocked it, giggling like a schoolboy. They tussled, less to hurt and more as an excuse to get their hands on each other, and it ended as soon as it began: with Gene leaning over Babe to kiss him, Babe’s hand cradling the back of his head. 

Gene’s arms wobbled. “Shit, I gotta--” he lowered himself back to the bed, panting. “How’d I get here, anyway?” Last he remembered, he was taking a header into the coffee table.

“I, uh.” Babe rubbed the back of his head, pleased with himself, but a little embarrassed, too. “I carried you.”

Gene sighed. “It was bridal style, wasn't it.”

“I wasn't just gonna toss you over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes, you broke a fucking curse for me.”

“Yeah, alright.” 

Babe went up on his elbow to look down at him. His expression was so serious. “Gene. You gotta know, I--” He shook his head. “There’s no way I’ll ever be able to--”

“Stop.” Gene put his fingers over Babe’s mouth. “Don’t say it.”

Babe’s expression went confused, then thunderous. “I swear to the Virgin Mary, if you say it was just a job, or that it didn’t _matter_, I am pushing you outta this bed.”

“No, it’s not that.” Gene slowly traced over the outline of Babe’s mouth. “If you thank a traiteur, the healing won’t take.” 

Babe stared down at him, and Gene _saw_ how his eyes darkened. He stared down at Gene, and sweet tension built between them. Babe bent down and kissed Gene, firm and a little desperate. “There anything against me showing it?” he asked, when he pulled back.

“Not a thing,” Gene replied, breathless. “Not if you don’t mind I can’t get it up.”

“What--not at _all_?"

Gene rolled his eyes. “_Babe_. I just spent a week breaking a curse that took three traiteurs to finish. I can barely hold myself up. You really think I can get an erection?”

Babe slowly went as red as Uncle Uli’s prize tomatoes. “Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘Oh’. C’mere.” He dragged Babe back down, and after a moment of resistance, Babe caved, lowering his head to trail stinging, soft kisses over Gene’s lips. Gene realized he was tracing their outline, like Gene had Babe’s. His heart pounded in his chest. He was going to burn alive, and Babe Heffron would be the tinder. He shifted closer, wanting to feel Babe’s body pressed against his, but Babe did an awkward half-hitch back with his hips. The moment paused. Gene looked up at Babe’s face and saw that even his ears had gone red.

“Don’t take much to get me going, since you broke the curse,” he said, not quite meeting Gene’s gaze. “Don’t mean nothing by it, I know you’re not--I’m not trying to--”

Gene reached down and put his hand over Babe’s cock, almost fully hard in his jeans, and that shut him up. “You were just gonna try and hide this?” Gene said, stroking gently.

Babe didn’t say anything, his lip caught between his teeth. His breathing had quickened.

“I can help out, if you want.” Gene kept his touch light, a tease through the heavy denim. Babe’s hips rocked up against his hand, a hesitant, barely-there motion that had to be sending him wild. It was sending _Gene_ wild, and there was no way in this life or the next he was getting hard, but a low heat was building in his belly, and a fierce desire to see Babe come took hold of him. “Babe?”

“You don’t gotta,” Babe said, closing his eyes in what looked like pain.

“No,” Gene replied, leaning in for another kiss. “But I really wanna.” He popped the top button of Babe’s jeans and swallowed Babe’s gasp. He slowly pulled the zipper down, his knuckles grazing against the blood-hard, cotton-covered flesh within, and Babe shuddered, full-body shuddered, just at the lightest touch of Gene’s fingers against his cock.

“Probably won’t last long,” he said breathlessly. “Been a hell of a dry spell, you know?”

“I don’t mind,” Gene replied. He tried to draw Babe down, but the covers were in the way, and Babe’s jeans were in the way, and all told they had too many clothes on. “Wait, hold on.”

“Hold on? Hold _what_ on, make up your--”

Gene pulled off his shirt, and Babe fell silent. Gene knew he wasn’t much to look at--skinnier than a blade of grass and barely a chest hair to his name, but he had decent muscle tone, as much as his body would let him put on. He’d accepted his fate with a shrug and gotten on with life.

Babe looked like he’d been hit over the head with a Looney Tunes mallet. “Jesus,” he breathed, and Gene suddenly wondered if this was the first time Babe had ever had sex with a man in a bed, rather than some frantic fuck in a bathroom stall or up against an alley.

“Nah, just Gene,” he said, and laughed when Babe tried to smother him with the spare pillow.

“Fuckin’ wise guy, oughta kick your ass back to Louisiana--”

“Can’t fuck my ass if you kick it to Lousiana,” Gene shot back, and there, Babe was stunned again, enough for Gene to sneak his hands under Babe’s shirt haul it up to his armpits. “That got your attention, huh?”

Babe yanked the shirt off and threw it over his shoulder. He wasn’t a chiselled gym bunny, but God, the Army had done well by him. “No, Gene, it was a very uninteresting, boring thing you just said, no appeal to it whatsoever.”

“Get your pants off,” Gene replied, kicking the covers back.

“Thought I left the Army,” Babe grumbled, but he got his pants off, and then they were down to underwear, and raw electricity ran beneath Gene’s skin everywhere it touched Babe’s. His cock, bless its fool heart, tried its level best to rise to the occasion, but some things just weren’t meant to be. Gene put it from his mind and went back to kissing Babe, palming his cock just to wring the sweetest moan from him.

“Christ, Gene,” Babe breathed. He ran a hand up and down Gene’s side. “This just don’t seem like a square deal.”

“Make it up to me with a blowjob later.” Gene didn’t have time for Babe’s moral qualms of fairness; he wanted Babe’s cock in his hand. He tugged it loose from Babe’s underwear, and he certainly did _not_ miss the way it twitched, or the way a clear drop of precome bubbled at the tip.

“_Gene_, you can’t just fucking _say_ things like that--”

“Just did,” Gene replied. He wrapped his fingers around the sturdy girth of Babe’s cock and gave an experimental stroke. Babe responded magnificently, his abs clenching and his hips rocking forward.

“Fuck, fuck, _fuck_\--”

He was cut, and he was a true redhead. Gene gave another stroke, firmer this time, and he imagined sucking Babe off--Christ, he wanted to, wanted to fucking choke himself on that cock--but not until Babe was tested. God only knew where he’d been.

He tried to vary the stroke, to see what Babe liked versus what cooled him down, but Babe hadn’t been joking. Hardly any time went by before he was clutching at Gene’s arm, his hips stuttering forward.

“Gene, I--I’m--”

“Easy, easy,” Gene said, and Babe cracked up laughing, unhinged and gasping as he came against Gene’s stomach.

“Christ,” he panted, his limbs going slack.

“What was that about?” Gene asked, keeping his hand on Babe’s cock as he softened, half curious to see how sensitive he got.

“I was in Easy Company.” Babe laid a kiss against Gene’s shoulder. He stiffened with a sudden realization. “I guess they’re all dead now.”

Gene rubbed his thumb against the root of Babe’s cock, where it was probably the least sensitive. It wasn’t the greatest place, but he couldn’t rightly reach up and stroke Babe’s hair with jizz all over his hand. And he didn’t have any other fucking ideas. He wasn’t good with this part of healing.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said, feeling like an idiot with how inadequate it was.

Babe shook his head, burying his face in the pillow for a long moment before easing back with a sigh. He grabbed his discarded shirt and wiped them both off, paying special attention to Gene’s hand. “Ain’t nothing you could have done,” he finally said. “You didn’t get me cursed, and hell, you springing me means I’ll die and see them sooner.” He gave a wobbly smile that broke Gene’s heart. He laid his hand over Babe’s chest, the least awkward thing he could think to do.

“I’ll keep you company till then,” he said.

Babe’s breath hitched. Gene knew he was a fucking dumbass for the low burn of panic in his belly at the prospect of tears, but he wasn’t gonna ditch Babe, not over this. He may be a coward, but the only way to change that was one brave act at a time, even if it meant suffering your--his mind stuttered over what to call Babe, but he pushed it away. He could stand a few tears. For Babe’s sake. Christ knew he had more than enough of his own.

“Mrrow?”

They both froze as Piggy jumped up on the bed, marching up to plant himself between them.

“Oh, come on,” Gene sighed as Piggy sniffed his face.

Babe broke into a fragile smile. “I got it.” He pushed himself up and snagged Piggy around the middle. “Come on, fuzzball, out you go.” Piggy whined piteously, but Babe tossed him out into the hall and shut the door after. Piggy immediately started scratching at it. Babe laughed. “You dumb cat, you think you’re gonna open it that way?”

“What’s he doing?”

“Nothing, just sticking his paw under the door.” He shook his head, crawling back up the bed. Gene held his arm out, and there was a brief moment of tension, where Babe looked up at him to make sure he wasn’t being made fun of. Gene looked away, taking the sting of challenge away from it, and Babe relaxed, settling himself down to awkwardly rest his head against Gene’s shoulder. “Cats,” he said. “I swear to Christ. There was this one queen in my neighborhood, she had all the girls under her thumb.”

Gene brushed his fingers through Babe’s hair, aching with tenderness. And maybe exhaustion. “Just the girls?”

“Oh, yeah. Definitely none of us guys.”

“Uh-huh.” Babe’s weight against him was perfect, so perfect. Gene felt like he had the whole fucking world in his arms.

Of course, he fell asleep. 

***

Gene stepped out into the pre-dawn light of the living room, and it was like returning to a place he hadn’t seen in a decade. The contours were the same, the furniture familiar and the walls still covered in Renée’s brightly-colored prints, but Gene felt himself so radically changed he barely recognized it. 

He’d woken beneath Babe’s strangling arms, and it had been pleasant at first, to feel another body pressed against his, but Gene was wide awake now. He was the most awake he’d felt in a week.

He thought he’d be the only one up so early, but there was a light in the kitchen. It spilled out into the living room, falling over the couch where Renée was sleeping, buried beneath their spare down comforter.

His grandmother was in the kitchen, cooking. “Salut, Mémé.”

“Bon matin, Eugène. Did you sleep well?”

“Yeah.” He meandered over to see what she was making. “Pain perdu?”

“Mais ya. This is a special occasion, no?”

Gene shook his head, though he didn’t contradict her out loud. “Tante Irene’s still asleep?”

“Yes, and your Babe?”

“Yeah.” Butterflies lit off in Gene’s stomach at the thought of Babe in his bed.

“Bon. Now you will tell me what caused that bahbin you just made.” She tsked at him. “No, not at the thought of your beau, mais, boy. I said this is an occasion and you looked like you wanted to disagree.”

Gene shrugged uncomfortably, looking away. “Ain’t that special.”

“Good Lord, give me strength.” She rinsed and dried her hands then squared off against Gene, her hands on her hips. “Why, exactly, ain’t it special?”

Gene gritted his teeth. Nothing he said would look good: either false humility or grasping for compliments. He kept quiet.

His grandmother didn’t ease up on him a bit. “You broke your first curse. A curse mean enough to kill, mon Eugène, and you broke it.” 

Gene shook his head again, his face turned away. But he knew his grandmother would just ferret it out of him like a hunting dog, so he made himself say it anyway. “Should’ve been me.” 

“Eugène, it _was_ you. I was there by your side the night before last, you broke it.”

“No, I mean--” his throat closed, and he swallowed with a click. “Thomasine.”

He knew it was past time he gave this up. It was three years gone, and Irene had forgiven him, and if _she_ had, then odds were good Nonc Eduard had never been mad in the first place. It had happened, and Gene needed to let it go.

Except for how he couldn’t. It was a lead weight in his heart, dragging him down. _The Lord will judge you, Eugene Roe_.

Mémé Eva gently pried his hands away from his armpits and held them gently in hers. She was so small; it was easy to forget, sometimes, when she filled a room with her presence. “You listen to me, Eugène. I lost two grandchildren that day. Oh, how I grieved, hadn’t le Bon Dieu taken my own daughter the year before?”

“Mémé, I was fine.”

“Guilt took you the way cancer took Maud and that tree Thomasine,” she replied. “Non, non, hush. You listen, ça va? You were lost, Eugène, and I mourned. But then the Lord saw fit to give you back to me. You don’t want to celebrate? Bon, you’re tête dur worse than your maman. But I will celebrate, because mon petit-fils, mon beau petit-fils si forte, si courageaux--” she squeezed his hands with each word, “--is returned to me.”

Gene felt himself trembling--fuck, he hoped he wasn’t going to cry again, he’d had enough of _that_ to last him a decade--and then his grandmother drew him into her arms. “Je t’adore, Eugène. Your mama would be so proud.”

Maybe a tear or two squeezed out. Gene figured they didn’t count, when you were hugging your grandmother.

“Cho, you stink,” she said, finally pulling back. “When last did you shower?”

Gene had to stop and think for a moment.

“Pour l’amour de Dieu, if you can’t remember then it’s been too long! Chepasse! Come back when you’re clean!”

He chepassais, and maybe that lead weight had lifted a little. He sniffed an armpit on the way to the bathroom. Shit, was she right.

***

“Okay, okay, I’m coming. Fuck off.”

“Yeah, you’re moving real fast. Come on, Renée has classes, get your ass up.”

“You know, not all of us have been sleeping all week--”

Gene’s stomach growled so hard he hunched around it. “It’s pain perdu, I’m not missing it just because you hate mornings. Up!” He yanked the covers back, baring Babe to the cold.

“Jesus Christ!”

From the other bedroom, he heard Renée laugh. “Is Babe not a morning person?”

“No, he is fu--he’s not!” Babe snarled, advancing on Gene, who just threw a shirt at him.

“You’ll be thanking me in five minutes,” he said. He was almost dressed himself, fresh from the shower, and he dug for another shirt while Babe grumbled and dragged on his jeans.

When his head was clear, he saw how Babe’s eyes were fixed on his stomach, a little glassy around the eyes. The mood shifted from grumpy to horny, and fuck, Gene had forgotten how validating being in love could feel.

“Like what you see?” he asked.

“If you was a broad I’d whistle at you on the street,” Babe said solemnly.

Gene socked him in the stomach. “Don't even joke about that, what's the matter with you?”

“Well, I can't lie, Doc--it's that little trail of hair going down from your belly button, just thinking about it it kept me _up_ all last night--”

“Unbelievable,” Gene muttered, but he was grinning as he kissed Babe quiet. “Get dressed.”

“Think that’s kinda counter-productive--”

It physically hurt, but Gene pried himself away and crossed his arms over his chest, staring down at Babe until he sighed and pulled the shirt over his head. He spread his arms wide. “There, you happy?”

“Overjoyed.” He took Babe’s hand and hauled him up, and that was all it took before they were kissing again, Babe nipping at his nip and walking them toward the bedroom door. Between the smell of him and the press of their bodies together, Gene felt confident in his ability to perform in the next round.

...Which would have to wait, because his grandmother had made breakfast, and Gene was _not_ going to sit through a family meal with a hard-on. Puberty had given him enough of that for a lifetime.

“Come--come on,” he said, turning his face away. “Got better things to eat than me.”

Babe choked out a shocked laugh. “Christ, Gene, they can hear--”

“Ain’t the worst they’ve heard. Let’s go, come on.” He chivvied Babe out the door. Babe’s cheeks were red with stubble burn; Gene felt a little swell of possessive pride at that.

“What's pan perdoo anyway?” Babe asked over his shoulder.

Gene made an awful snorting laugh. “You’re such a fucking Anglais.”

“You take that _back_, I’m not English!”

“Means ‘lost bread’,” Gene said, ignoring him. “You Anglais--” He yelped as Babe dug his fingers into his side. “Anglophones! You anglophones call it French bread!”

“You're goddamn lucky it's the future and my nan is dead, God rest her, or she’d rip you a new asshole for calling us English. You think I don't know you're talking about me in that frogspeak, you'n your grandma?”

Gene turned to kiss him, leaning him back against the hallway to do it. “Only the good stuff.”

Babe softened, distracted and loosening into the kiss. Gene barely remembered what they were talking about anymore; he slipped his thigh between Babe’s and--

“It's like watching a wildlife documentary.” Renée’s voice broke into the heated rush between them, and Gene jerked back in surprise.

“Mating rituals of the human male,” she continued in that wry tone. “Are you going to move, or do I have to wait for you to get off, first?”

Wordlessly, they shifted to let her by. Gene buried his face in Babe’s neck.

“Never gonna get used to that,” Babe said, his voice thin.

“What, getting interrupted?”

Babe’s pulse was rapidfire against Gene’s cheek. “People seeing and not caring.”

“She cares. She's already planning how many children we’re gonna adopt.”

“Three!” Renée called from the kitchen.

“One!” Gene yelled back. “Maybe!”

The uncertainty on Babe’s face drew him back to himself. “It's just joking. We’ll take it one day at a time.”

“I--I can't even--everything is so different.” Babe took a deep breath, and Gene made himself keep listening, even though he couldn’t make himself look higher than Babe’s shoulder. “I think I’ve got a hold on everything, all the changes, but then something like--like you living with a girl and no one thinking anything of it, or shit, I went to the grocery store with your aunt and I had to keep from knocking every hat off all the other guys’ heads. Nobody cares about that, now.”

It was on the tip of Gene’s tongue to say that, no, there were plenty of grannies who’d twist your ear off for wearing a hat in church, but he bit it back. Communication in relationships had never been his strong point, but he wasn't a complete idiot. He took Babe’s hand instead, shaking it gently.

“One day at a time, huh?”

Babe nodded. They stood there for a while, leaning against each other, until Irene called out, “Come get it while it's hot, or I’m feeding your share to the dogs!”

“Ain't got your dogs up here in Philly!” Gene shouted back, untangling himself from Babe to pull him down the short hall to the kitchen.

“I will _find_ some dogs and feed them your breakfast, Eugene, so help me.”

“Hell, I’ll eat it,” Babe piped up. “It smells great.”

Renée gasped. “Babe, you dog!”

“Thank you, cher,” Mémé Eva said, putting down a plate of pain perdu and fried potatoes. “But Eugène knows better than to waste food, isn't that right?”

Gene kissed the top of her head before pulling over a chair for Babe. “Oui, Mémé.”

They settled themselves around the kitchen table, all in a circle and bumping elbows, and for a while there was nothing but the sounds of eating and the appreciation of good food.

“So, Renée,” Mémé Eva said, in a tone Gene knew all too well from a dozen family get-togethers. “You’re going to school to be a Physician Assistant?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Renée replied.

Mémé Eva looked to her daughter. “Mr. Granger is a Physician Assistant, ain't he?”

“Nurse Practitioner,” Irene replied around a mouthful of potatoes.

“Well, close enough. Anyway, we never see Dr. Lorraine much, he stays down in Morgan City, but we do see Mr. Granger. He's a good man. You remember Mr. Granger, Eugène?”

Gene shrugged. He remembered him mostly as a chatty old man, who had as many problems with his knees as his patients did. He had an inkling where this conversation was going, and from the look on Renée’s face, she did, too.

“He's getting old, though. Last Sunday he said to me as we were coming out of church, ‘Eva, I don't think I’ll be able to retire, no one wants to live in a small town.’ I told him that was nonsense, of course, plenty of good folk live in Belle River.”

“None of them want to go into medicine, though,” Irene said “None want to be traiteurs, either.”

“Do all traiteurs do what youse do?” Babe asked. “Break curses and stuff?”

“Lord, no,” Irene replied. “Most traiteurs handle small things. Sprains, sore throats, asthma, coup-de-soleil. Some are charlatans, trading off the prestige.” As one, all three traiteurs made the sign of the cross. 

“That's true of any group, though,” Renée said, taken aback.

Gene grunted. “They make the rest of us look bad. And us vrais traiteurs, the one who need a week to recover from pulling out someone’s lockjaw, we get called lazy.”

He could almost see the question marks on Babe’s face. “That don’t make any kind of sense, though.”

“To most Américains, we’re white trash.” Gene shrugged, sopping up syrup with leftover crusts. “Most don’t know or don’t believe we channel the Will. Think we’re all bons à rien, layabouts. It can be hard to hold down a job if you heal a lot, and--well, you know how it sounds, Renée. Superstitious hick mumbo jumbo. And we’re more Cajun than the rich white city folk, which don’t help.”

“They’re anglais all through,” Irene said bitingly. 

Babe’s outrage shifted into grim understanding. 

“That’s how my other grandparents are,” Gene said. “They didn’t like their son marrying a coonass out bayou way.”

Mémé Eva smacked him upside the head. “You respect your maman better than that, Eugène Roe, or you’ll be eating soap.”

“They're not usual,” Irene said to Renée. “Most people don't care, these days.”

“Mm, they cared in my days,” Mémé Eva said. “My teachers used to smack my hands if I spoke French in class.”

“That happened to my ma,” Babe said, sitting up. “My grandparents came from Ireland, and she knew Irish, but the nuns beat it out of her. A couple kids in my class, too, but I never spoke any, myself.”

“_Irish_ Catholic nuns?” Gene asked, frowning.

Babe shrugged. “‘English is the language you must use if you wish to socially advance,’” he said in crisp, newscaster English, so contrary to his own accent that Renée choked on her orange juice.

“Mais ya, that's what they said,” Mémé Eva said, sighing. “So few children these days know their language.”

“I know a little,” Renée ventured. “My parents are from Belgium, dinner conversation was always in French.”

Mémé Eva cooed. “She speaks _French_, Eugène, are you sure you don't want to marry her?”

“_Maman_,” Irene snapped.

Gene looked at Babe, whose expression had gone wooden, and then at Renée, who was poking her potatoes like they were the most interesting thing in front of her. He took Babe’s hand, where it was clenched over his thigh, and set them both on the edge of the table, where his grandmother couldn't help but see.

“I already came out, Mémé,” he said quietly. “I won't do it again.”

Mémé Eva’s eyes went wide. Gene was between her and Babe, but she reached around him and laid a hand on Babe’s shoulder. “No, cher, pay me no mind. I’m just an old woman, set in my ways. Je suis désolé.”

Babe looked at Gene, who nodded back, trying to say silently everything that had no place being spoken aloud at the breakfast table. 

“Yeah, it’s the future, alright,” Babe said, looking down at where Gene held his hand. “No one would have apologized for that, before.” He looked to Mémé Eva. “I don’t think you want me to learn French, though.”

All three Verrets winced at once, and Renée started laughing. “Oh my god, and you call Europeans snobs!”

“You’ve _heard_ him,” Gene said indignantly, but Renée waved him off.

“Ferme la, _Eugène_. With all respect, Miss Eva, but I wouldn’t want to marry your grandson anyway. He’s an idiot.”

Irene nodded. “He is that.”

Anyone else and Gene would have made a protest, but he wasn’t sure of the ground between him and Irene, yet. He glowered, though. Just in case.

Babe leaned back and stretched out an arm, draping it casually over the back of Gene’s chair. “I signed up for a World War,” he said. “Never made a smart decision in my life, probably won’t start now.”

“M’not a world war,” Gene muttered at his empty plate.

“You’re so cute,” Renée said with an evil gleam in her eye. Then she turned back to Gene’s grandmother. “So this practice you mentioned, I assume it’s primary care? Does your town offer loan reimbursement?”

Negotiations started in earnest, and Gene tuned it out. Instead, he leaned back against Babe’s arm.

“How you gonna pass the day?” he asked in a low voice.

Babe looked uneasy for a moment, but it cleared. “Thought I might go see what’s left of my family.”

“I did some research,” Gene said. “Found a few nephews and nieces, their children. I think your sister is still alive. I’ll give you everything I got.”

Babe let out a long sigh. “Thanks.”

“You want me to come with? Explain some?”

Babe thought about it for a moment. “Nah, I’d--” he glanced at Gene. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d rather do it myself.”

“Alright.” Gene nodded. It was probably better that way; his mama used to say it was good he was so quiet, because he had the tact of a left-handed crowbar.

“What are you two whispering about over there?” Mémé Eva said.

“The Phillies odds of winning the pennant,” Babe replied, easy as you please.

“Hm. You three get enough to eat?”

“Yeah, Mémé,” Gene replied. “Thank you.”

Irene harrumphed. “No love for your own daughter?”

Mémé Eva patted her head. “You’re old enough to make do yourself, chère. Also you and Babe are doing dishes.”

“_That’s_ the same,” Babe said wryly. 

Gene laughed as he pushed back his chair and stood. 

“No, Gene, come on, you can’t just leave a man behind--”

“Have fun, cher.” He bent to give him a kiss--maybe two--before he straightened, and caught short at the three women staring at him, varying expressions of fondness (or fond disgust) on their faces.

“Mind your own business,” he said, blushing.

“Young love,” Irene said, and she didn’t sound as prickly as she usually did.

Babe got to his feet. “You better watch your mouth, I’m old enough to be your--” he gave Mémé Eva a wary look. “...Pa,” he finished cautiously.

“A wise man,” Mémé Eva said serenely. “I’ll leave you two to it. Renée, you do well at class. Eugène, with me. This apartment is filthy.”

***

The wind blew like a mourning cry through the treetops, rattling the few dead, dried leaves still clinging to their branches. Gene tucked his coat tighter and trudged toward the grave the groundskeeper had pointed out to him on a map. Babe trudged at his side, equally bundled against the December cold, equally grim.

They didn’t say anything as they stood before the grave of Marjorie Crake. Marjorie Ludwig, it read on her headstone; beloved wife and mother, rest in peace.

“Hundred and one years,” Babe said. “Pretty good run.”

“I met her,” Gene said.

“Yeah? What was she like?”

“Bitter,” Gene said, after a moment’s thought. “Tired.”

Babe’s expression went hard. “Guess that was my fault.”

If there was a right response to that, Gene didn’t know it. He just looked at Babe, let him say whatever was eating at him at his own pace.

“You know, I--” Babe sucked in a sharp breath. “I don’t know what to think, you know? She fucked me over, but I did it to her first. Turn about’s fair play, or something.” He shifted his weight. “And it wasn’t all bad, is the thing. Fuck.” He ran a hand over his mouth, as if he could shove the words back in. “Four people--five died on account of me, and I have the fuckin’ _nerve_ to say ‘it wasn’t all bad’.”

“Maybe it wasn’t.” Gene shook his head. “I don’t mean me, quit that look.”

“What, then? What’d you mean?”

Gene shrugged. “You said it first. ‘Wasn’t all bad.’ You tell me.”

“Is this some--some traiteur bullshit, Gene, ‘cause I didn’t even wanna come here--”

“If I said it was, would you shut up and talk?”

Babe snorted. “Shut up _and_ talk?”

“Mother Mary.” Gene stomped his feet to warm them. “I brought you here because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t run from the ugliness in your past, you have to face it. Gotta retell the story to yourself somehow, so that you can live with it. Call it traiteuring, if you want.”

Babe looked at him for a long time, a lost, hurt look on his face, but he wasn’t looking at Gene so much as through him. He looked back at the grave. “Reckon we both learned our lesson, longer and harder than she meant. I tell you, Gene, I’m half-afraid to look at women again.”

“Good.”

Babe’s head jerked up to look at him, and Gene gave him a half-smile.

“Wiseass,” Babe muttered. 

“You talk to Renée every day.”

“Ah, she don’t count. She’s like my sister, or something.” Babe stared at Marjorie Crake’s name, as though the answers were written somewhere behind the etching. “I wonder if she got nightmares. I hope she did. I hope they kept her up at night.”

Gene had seen the nightmares that kept Babe up. He’d seen how Babe would sometimes spend an entire day like a zombie, staring out the window, or on autopilot if he was at work. He’d also seen a fraction of what caused it, so he didn’t push. The folks at the plant nursery thought he was an Iraq veteran, which was close enough to the truth that neither Gene nor Babe had said otherwise. It was a pretty good gig; one of Gene’s coworkers told him about it. The owners were pot-smoking socialist types, and they hired undocumented workers from time to time. Babe was as undocumented as they got.

He sighed. “But I also hope she didn’t suffer too bad from what I…”

The wind blew. Dead leaves skittered over the dry grass.

“I’m sorry, I guess,” Babe said to the gravestone. “I was just a young punk. Thought I’d seen the worst the world could offer, thought that gave me some kind of license to… be an asshole, I guess. Wasn’t thinking of nothing but my own hurt.” 

The grave didn’t reply. Gene didn’t really expect it to; ghosts were a lot less common than people thought. This was about Babe closing the last door on a past he couldn’t return to.

Babe looked a little hollowed out after that, and Gene figured it was as good a time as any to broach the other reason he’d brought Babe out to this frozen chunk of dirt in Lindenwold.

“Where do you think you’ll go from here?”

“Shit, Gene, ask a hard question, why don’t you?”

Gene didn’t rise to the bait, just looked at Babe. At the copper forelock poking out from under the cap Renée had knitted for him, at the modern clothes he somehow still gave an old-fashioned air to.

“You’re moving back to Louisiana?” Babe asked, like he didn’t already know.

“Yeah. Soon as Renée’s rotations are done and the paperwork at the clinic goes through.”

“Just me and myself here in Philly, then.”

“You got your family.” Gene forced himself to say it calmly, as though the thought of leaving Babe behind didn’t tear at his guts. It’d been a year already, and Babe had grown in against him in ways Gene couldn’t imagine uprooting.

“Yeah, my family.” Babe didn’t look happy about it. He took a breath, hesitated, the indecision on his face absolutely painful. “They don’t--they’re like strangers. Annie don’t even remember me, and I think the rest think I’m a con artist or something.”

Gene bit his lip to keep himself from saying it, to keep from swaying Babe’s decision. He’d never be able to live with himself if Babe followed him out of some hare-brained, noble idea of self-sacrifice. Repaying his debt, or whatever.

“There’s nothing for me here,” Babe said quietly. “Just graves.”

It was unbearable to imagine Babe alone, surrounded only by memories and regret. He was meant for happiness. Gene wanted to keep the decision untainted, but he was only human, and he loved Babe Heffron with all his heart. “Come with me,” he said in a rush. “To Louisiana.”

Life flooded back into Babe’s face, or maybe that was Gene’s desperate hope. “You mean it?”

“Share my family,” Gene said. “I’ve got more than enough, and they won’t doubt you.”

“That all?” Babe was looking at him intently. “Just your family?”

Gene huffed out a cloud of steam. “Heffron, you gonna make me say it?”

“Better out than in, that’s what my ma used to say.”

“_Asshole._ I love you. Happy?”

Babe’s eyes held a mischievous glint. “Nah, come on, you gotta sell it here, Gene. I’m moving to Louisiana for you, that the best you can do?”

Gene’s eyes went wide. “You are?”

“What kind of question is that? Yeah, I am, I just want to hear you make it worth my while!”

Gene didn’t think, he just fumbled for Babe’s face and kissed him. Right there, right in the middle of a graveyard. At two in the afternoon on a Sunday. He’d have kicked himself, if his mind hadn’t been otherwise occupied. He pulled back, breathing hard. “I love you, yeah,” he said, feeling awkward and embarrassed, but full up on sincerity.

Babe smiled a small, happy smile and held him close. Then his expression cleared.

“Wait, did you actually _doubt_ me? You _actually thought_ I’d leave your skinny ass in a swamp and stay up here without you?”

“Dieu aidez-moi,” Gene muttered, his cheeks heating.

“Don’t you go Frenching at me to escape an argument, you can’t distract me that easily--”

Gene kissed him again, this time through a smile, and he felt Babe smiling too, against his lips.

They made out like teenagers over a grave, a new year turning around the corner. 

***

END

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, that's it! Thanks for reading :)


End file.
